


Lizbob Supernatural Meta (season 4)

by lizbobjones



Series: Lizbob Supernatural Meta Collection [6]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Meta Essay, Non Fiction, archived from elizabethrobertajones blog
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 07:34:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 22,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16949730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizbobjones/pseuds/lizbobjones
Summary: I have been writing a lot of meta for a long-ass time on Tumblr.





	1. He seems helpful... and dreamy...

 

**What exactly did Chuck write about Sam?**

> SAM  
>  Um… I was just wondering how much you know. About me.  
>    
>  CHUCK  
>  What do you mean?  
>    
>  SAM  
>  Have you seen visions of me when I’m not with Dean?  
>    
>  CHUCK  
>  Oh… You want to know if I know about the demon blood.  
>    
>  SAM  
>  You didn’t tell Dean.  
>    
>  CHUCK  
>  **I didn’t even write it into the books.**  I was afraid it would make you look unsympathetic.  
>    
>  SAM  
>  Unsympathetic?

([from supernaturalwiki](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.supernaturalwiki.com%2Findex.php%3Ftitle%3D4.18_The_Monster_at_the_End_of_This_Book_%28transcript%29&t=MGU4MzlkMzY1NTk2NDBlMzhkODIyMjEwNDdlYTY3OTE3ODI2NGU1YixQU01CaFVzaw%3D%3D&b=t%3AEoTmUHpiEEiE91JGAXVv3Q&p=https%3A%2F%2Felizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F108911450713%2Fhe-seems-helpful-and-dreamy&m=1) 4x18, The Monster at the End of the Book)

**Unsympathetic.**

It’s worth repeating, Sam. For you right there it’s a loaded judgement, hearing a stranger (who knows every detail of your life right down to bathroom breaks probably) tell you about your own life in one shattering word.

But how exactly did the books covering the apocalypse treat Sam when the writer has decided to pull punches and make him “sympathetic” (no judgement on canon!Sam from me of course), and how does removing the demon blood storyline affect the plot, characters and overall tone of the Winchester Gospels?

The main impression we have of the tone and mood of the Supernatural books is from the fangirls: by 10x05 I’ve seen it presented as a running joke that the fangirls have all been Sam!Girls too. Of those fans, eventually all of them would have read seasons 4 and 5 - Becky in season 7 should have read it by then (assuming she wasn’t following it like a soap opera through Chuck’s writing while they dated and then immediately devoured anything she missed when she got her hands on the rest of it after Chuck vanished - I assume he bequeathed it all to her somehow as the appropriate person to spread the Word and she didn’t just go stalk his house at some unspecified point between Swan Song and season 8) and, uh, whatever she read, it doesn’t dampen her enthusiasm for Sam. Charlie thinks Sam is “One tough customer” based on her reading of the text and Marie literally plays favourites. Of the three of them Becky is the only one who might feasibly know about the demon blood storyline, and only if Chuck actually told her personally. Kinda assume she doesn’t unless Chuck got jealous that she still fancied Sam, but this is not a post wildly speculating about the sordid details of their brief fling. Heh. I’m here for  _serious_  ridiculous speculation thank you very much.

So we know Chuck felt that Sam’s storyline might alienate him from the readers and he was written without the much darker addiction metaphor.

**What could Sam’s storyline have been instead?**

The most obvious explanation is Sam’s powers come from proximity to demons but also Lucifer in particular. The original demon blood storyline from Yellow Eyes probably made its way into the early books as there’s nothing in there that makes it unsympathetic to Sam: he’s clearly a victim and it’s a neat explanation with the stories’ standard themes of personal autonomy which are impossible to miss. We can assume that Yellow-Eyes still gave Sam demon blood as an infant (but this was the last time he’s shown ingesting it in book!canon), and his powers grow in strength in vague correlation to their adventures, particularly as they’re shown steadily escalating through the Speshul Children storyline.

Come season 4, Sam is going to take a massive leap forward in psychic ability. Working on the Lucifer connection, there’s a great plotline there to fill in the gaps of their knowledge: each time a seal breaks, Lucifer is a little more free, Sam is a little stronger. It would be super crappy for book!Dean to find out that not only did he start the apocalypse but he’s the reason for Sam’s increased demonic powers.  _Two for one on angst, get it while it’s unbearable_. It almost makes Sam’s showdown with Lilith MORE narratively neat, as everything builds up together, his power versus the seals she’s ripping down, an inevitable dance that draws them together.

There’s also the “proximity to demons” thing at play: Sam spends time on and off with Ruby throughout the season, and ~funnily enough~ his powers wax and wane depending on that. Clearly there’s a proximity thing going on here, and there’s no reason to leave out Sam/Ruby. Ergo, sleeping with a demon is the most contact he can have with one *waggles eyebrows suggestively* and corresponds with his power being strongest. This sounds like a lot of trashy supernatural fiction you can actually buy on the market IRL already, except as far as I’ve heard the “sex!magic” storyline usually goes to female characters who’d otherwise be accused of being slutty if the author didn’t find a “good” excuse to explain how she bangs someone every other chapter.

**So there’s the groundwork for Sympathetic!Sam.**

He’s got this power against his will, and the super dark and sympathy-damaging addiction is left out, leaving him caught in a noble struggle against his own nature, his love for the hot demon girl who is  _completely unknowingly to him_ feeding his powers, and the more epic story at work, which includes defending all this against Dean’s mistrust of Ruby and [footage not found].

Sam’s powers are pretty much hand-waved by Sam in canon since he won’t just out and say why he’s stronger, as per [4x04](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.supernaturalwiki.com%2Findex.php%3Ftitle%3D4.04_Metamorphosis_%28transcript%29&t=YzljMTJmZGQ0YWE4ODBkZGViZWQ1MDIxNTNkOGM4MDJlMGFlZmQzOCxQU01CaFVzaw%3D%3D&b=t%3AEoTmUHpiEEiE91JGAXVv3Q&p=https%3A%2F%2Felizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F108911450713%2Fhe-seems-helpful-and-dreamy&m=1):

> DEAN  
>  That what Ruby want you to think? Huh? Kind of like the way **she tricked you into using your powers?**  
>    
>  Slippery slope, brother. Just wait and see. Because it’s gonna get darker and darker, and God knows where it ends.  
>    
>  SAM  
>  I’m not gonna let it go too far.  
>    
>  [ _cropped for angst_ ]
> 
>   
>  SAM  
>  You were gone. I was here. I had to keep on fighting without you. And what I’m doing… It works.  
>    
>  DEAN  
>  Well, tell me. If it’s so terrific… then why’d you lie about it to me?  
>    
>  Why did an angel tell me to stop you?  
>    
>  SAM  
>  What?  
>    
>  DEAN  
>  Cas said that if I don’t stop you, he will. See what that means, Sam? That means that God doesn’t want you doing this.

And in [4x07](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.supernaturalwiki.com%2Findex.php%3Ftitle%3D4.07_It%2527s_the_Great_Pumpkin%2C_Sam_Winchester_%28transcript%29&t=ZDcyNDIwYTUzMjBiNDViYWMyMDNhZDk3NTZlZDZmNTNiNzhjZDRkNixQU01CaFVzaw%3D%3D&b=t%3AEoTmUHpiEEiE91JGAXVv3Q&p=https%3A%2F%2Felizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F108911450713%2Fhe-seems-helpful-and-dreamy&m=1):

> URIEL:
> 
> It’s the day Azazel killed your mother, and 22 years later your girlfriend too. It must be difficult to bear, yet you so brazenly use the power he gave you.  **His profane blood pumping through your veins.**
> 
>   
>  SAM:
> 
> Excuse me?
> 
>   
>  URIEL:
> 
> **You were told not to use your abilities.**

This is pretty much gift-wrapped if we’re taking this at face value as the explanation offered in the books by Chuck. Since Dean doesn’t know what is going on and we’re never going to find out, this becomes pretty much the actual version of events.

This also quickly recasts Sam’s trust in Ruby as more natural and less dependant as it removes her dealer status, and makes their relationship much less dubious for the bulk of the season, with the first clues only coming with The Rapture, when it’s finally revealed that Sam’s powers aren’t necessarily his own, but *vague noises about finally being around demons again after a long separation from Ruby.* Probably the showdown involves a moment edgy for a book series which is much less comfortable with showing its main characters doing bad things, but not as edgy as Sam drinking demon blood, such as randomly magically activating while being manhandled by the demons, and his earlier uselessness just serves as a sharp contrast - perhaps he appears to take energy from the demon through touch first or some such thing, and through this Dean realises he’s basically  _accidentally_  draining off demon essence and may not have even known that his contact with Ruby was doing this to him. The detox in Leevee Breaks might have Chuck throwing in some cleansing ritual Bobby found or something to start the process rather than cutting him off cold turkey, or creative license with time passing to get him there. *shrug* There’s no evidence for how Chuck deals with plot holes, especially ones he intentionally creates. :P

The reveal at the end of Lucifer Rising is probably accompanied with book!Ruby fans screeching in anger as the relationship was entirely defensible as “you just don’t like her because she’s a demon but she’s really genuinely good because ~weak but pretty female character who exists entirely to bang the main character and do nothing else that would compromise her character despite being a demon so it must be true love~” from start to bitter end, essentially making it a story of Sam feeling persecuted for having the “demony” powers and choosing to use them for good on a genuine moral high ground as he sees it, feeling more comfortable with Ruby, who encourages him to do good, plays up being the good demon herself to win his love and show having something demony about you isn’t inherently bad, blah blah blah okay, I can see imaginary book!fandom Sam!girls crying now so I’ll stop. (I do think it’s interesting all the stuff in the play in 10x05 was from season 1-2 and then skipped to 5x04 next time there was any identifiable canon; we never saw a Ruby actress…)

Season 5, heartbroken by the betrayal, Sam stops using his powers and assumes they’ll fizzle out without Ruby to strengthen them, but (if the books hadn’t all been dumped on the internet at once, speculation might have suggested it was the Power of True Love or something, but a fast reader will come along to debunk that theory now): Lucifer is free. Now the Lucifer-activated side of Sam’s powers come into play, and the addiction metaphor is more obvious, thank goodness, because the Leevee Breaks plotholes were a real stretch to cover. Now, it can either be proximity, or just that Sam is trying really hard to resist the entire time, and we only see him give in around Famine for obvious reasons, but it’s only the craving to *use* the powers, as if using them is inherently bad, and Sam’s denying this side of himself despite his obvious desire to do it for good and the fact he’s now desperately trying to agree with Dean that it’s a terrible no good thing about him - for a moment we see him embrace that again. The parallel between the way Lucifer kills all those demons in Abandon All Hope and Sam killing the ones in Swan Song to show Lucifer he’s ready is the moment where Sam shows he’s not afraid to use these powers and that he’s the master of them, even if he can only do it because Lucifer’s standing right there in the room with them: his strength of mind demonstrated to Lucifer at the beginning of the book arcs over to him winning in the end.

So for a season worth of books Sam is just constantly holding himself up - think season 7 Sam holding up through the Hell visions for months on end. But just this constant pressure that if these powers are a part of him and inherently bad (as proven by his mistakes with Ruby), is Sam himself inherently bad? - not far off actual Sam characterisation (though an impression that got pushed much further only at the end of season 8?). The omission doesn’t hurt the story, but without the earlier addiction storyline and genuine mistakes on Sam’s part, it becomes a much more sinister, constant weight on him, the scapegoats he might have had in the show all taken away.

And under those circumstances he handled himself magnificently.

One tough customer, really.

…

Yeah, if you read all of this thinking it was a Sam meta and the title was really weirdly chosen:

So. Initially, this isn’t too wacky. Angels hate demons, Sam’s fraternising with the enemy, writing them as just really not cool with that is fine. It's  _fine_.

I mean, you have the mid-to-late season 4 parallels with Ruby and Cas to Sam and Dean now almost entirely levelled - where in the show Ruby and Sam is much more dubious and the audience is in on the blood and therefore the unhealthy side of their relationship much sooner, Sam/Ruby is for the majority of the books more wholesome without it so the relationships are being compared on face value, and both come with a twist at the end: Cas rebels for Dean, Ruby betrays Sam. And more importantly, while the angels don’t approve of Sam/Ruby, the application of Cas to the storyline for much of the season is suddenly much vaguer.

**And it’s gold.**

For the first few episodes, things stay exactly the same. Dean gets to know Cas… 4x03 which is framed around Dean finding out Sam is chilling with Ruby isn’t different because there’s no demon blood involved. The angels might rail against Sam doing it but the argument is weakened because Sam himself never oversteps the moral line which would make him “unsympathetic”. Remember, from start to finish of this arc, Sam is an unknowing/unwilling victim struggling against the idea that having powers that come from a dark source can be used for good, just like in the show except the morality is much clearer. It would seem like the angels really are just being dicks about this. Their inherent dislike of Sam would still be present, Cas can still call Sam an abomination if he likes, but as the stuff about Sam’s powers never really changes as we stick with the ~ate demon blood as a baby and now Lucifer is making him stronger~ explanation, the mistrust and continued antagonism with Sam and Cas lasts way longer than it should as Cas is beginning to warm up to Dean, and Dean to him. Really all it does is cause an unnecessary divide whereby Cas is given a reason to constantly gravitate towards Dean instead, like their particularly close relationship needs justifying and Chuck can’t come up with better reasons to push Cas at Dean without it being a “&Sam” scenario. Yeeeah, just make Cas continually several steps behind on liking Sam, and it’s perfect. This is such lazy writing Chuck. *shakes head*

Let’s assume things stay mostly as they are until they can’t go much further without Chuck being like “Woah woah woah, I can’t write that.”

This would be when we the show audience found out about the demon blood - On The Head of a Pin, where Sam drinks Ruby’s blood to be strong enough to kill Alastair. Obviously, he still needs to do something to be strong enough to kill Alastair, so leaving in the Sam/Ruby scene without the blood play would be the obvious writing choice. At first this doesn’t do much, except that it causes the first crack between the parallels we draw and the parallels the book!fandom draws. They see an episode focussed on two relationships: Sam/Ruby and Cas/Dean. In fact the Sam/Ruby thing is completely gratuitous except to show one relationship ramping up beside the other and to make you compare and contrast what’s going on in the brothers’ lives. There’s plenty to say innocently about Dean having an angel bestie and Sam hanging out with a demon, but these pulpy novels are pushing the romance aspect of one at least way harder than necessary.

Anyway, in this episode, Cas is beginning to *really* give the readers a reason to like him as the division between him and the other angels is made, and along with his open and emotional conversation with Dean at the end and all the other little Destiel things it’s just a good episode for the ship and we give it credit for that in show!fandom so book!fandom’s got to like it too if they ship it. On the other side of the parallel for the first time we’re seeing Sam actually kind of scary and it’s linked to his closeness to Ruby: the scales are tipping between the two pairings as which one is more trustworthy.

(On the subject of this episode - thinking of unsympathetic characters, did Chuck really write everything about Dean breaking in Hell and then the details of him torturing Alastair? There could be another reason there are more Sam!girls off the book canon if he felt this was unavoidable for the sake of the plot, given how deep it stretched - by the time they meet him it’s long established on the show, so if it was going to be in the book there’s not much Chuck can do about it except try to manage Dean’s image via word choice. I think it’s kinda likely from this line of thought that Sam tends towards being the viewpoint or at least main character so sanitising Sammy is more important as he’s who the readers are latching onto, given that Chuck specifically uses the word sympathy in relation to Sam’s characterisation.)

Aside from never writing down his exchange with Sam in The Monster At The End Of The Book, or at least part of it, that one probably stays unchanged?

Aaand then we get to the episode that made me stop and laugh in the middle of the street as this wild idea hit me.

**Book!Destiel vs Show!Destiel:**

So, in The Rapture, Dean finds out about the demon blood, except he doesn’t in the books. Sam  _actually_  steps out to get a coke. Or does he? The episode features him needing more demon blood with the addiction quite clear… With that side of it taken away, imagine Chuck writing in those phone calls to Ruby about being out of blood as just phone calls for missing Ruby, who he’s pushed away in a crisis of conscience about being with a demon.

What we have here is an episode about Sam/Ruby feeling ripped apart (OH the romantic melodrama!) and at the same time Cas being actually ripped away and parted from Dean after their sweet little fishing dream moment. As I’ve seen pointed out several times in meta, Dean gets reckless and acts weird about Jimmy almost like he was endangering him at points with the aim of forcing Cas to come back, and it really does seem like he was leaning on that in the big dramatic conclusion of the episode. So what we have is Dean … okay, I started writing this before 10x10 but I’m going to change my word choice accordingly…  _longing_  for Cas to come back, while Sam is in the background  _longing_ for his girlfriend to come back and, because the blood plot line is nixed, not much else.

... So what does that imply?

At the end of the episode, Cas comes back reprogrammed and rejects Dean: he’s had forcible intervention from his family to stop him helping Dean and it’s specifically phrased at Dean in-show. Sam is dragged off and, since the demon powers is currently hinging entirely on his relationship with a demon, told to break it off with her and thrown in the panic room for his own protection while they work out what to do about the fact his powers have grown to the point where they’re genuinely unstable.

The next episode is about Dean wigging out about Sam’s powers definitely being a creepy demon thing which has suddenly become a current problem and not just harking back to his historical one-time incident as a baby (presented in whatever way Chuck felt he could without showing Sam chowing down on a demon), and, presumably for Sam’s own safety until they can understand what’s actually happening to him (because, vague magic explanation, no obvious “Duh he’s drinking demon blood” moment), they keep him in the panic room.

Sam’s forced into intense self-reflection and for whatever reason Chuck can come up with (probably something vague about Sam’s power doing it to him because after all he did have visions in the early books) he still goes through all that. Here’s the next interesting parallel. Remembering that Sam’s powers are an inherent part of him, and this flare up is basically  _hay fever_  rather than anything Sam did to himself more than not realise why he was enjoying Ruby’s company so much, and without that hanging over him in the same way, there’s an odd thing about when he’s let out and runs off to join Ruby again, then fights with Dean.

You could say there’s a parallel here already for us but Sam’s show storyline is so weighted towards the demon blood and his choice in that (again: removing the demon blood storyline makes Sam a passive agent in this whole thing), that what we have here is really a dark mirror for Cas next episode: Sam picks love of one person over family, and chooses to reunite with Ruby for what he sees as the greater good when his family is wrong (bearing in mind, of course, from Sam’s perspective in show OR books he thinks killing Lilith is the greater good that justifies everything, right up until the point of having actually done it - just that in the books the means to which he accomplishes this greater good are changed, and without the demon blood and this being an internal thing to Sam, the moral choice seems to be choosing Ruby, giving it a romantic slant it really did not have by this point in the show, because at this point Ruby can still be clinging to pretending to be a good demon way more than she could in the show when we knew how sketchy their arrangement was). He still gets to have the fight with Dean, and Dean can still be very dubious about what Sam’s powers are and what they mean for Sam. I mean Sam and Dean can drag melodrama out of grocery shopping if they wanted, this fight still works. 

So, yeah, then next episode Cas is forced to decide what the greater good is and thanks specifically to Dean, ditches out on Heaven and joins Team Free Will (and dies for it, which is a step further than Sam went in giving everything, though I suppose you could say choosing against Dean he may as well have picked death in every meaningful way :P). Because Sam’s moral choice is so much less weighted towards external evil influence, and he quite possibly does not kill and drink anyone in the lead up to killing Lilith (see above right at the top of this time-waster me pointing out how the breaking of the seals could also be instrumental in strengthening Sam instead, thus removing most of Sam’s part in Lucifer Rising entirely, making it mostly the Beautiful Room stuff and the focus stronger than ever on Dean and Cas) the two incidents are easier to compare: the only difference now between Sam and Cas’s choice is that Cas didn’t ‘obviously’ do it for romantic love. But the two stories work together with a very different synergy than they have on the show.

I think that’s pretty much the extra S-U-B-T-E-X-T that Marie was working on. Obviously season 5 has much less of this storyline, in ways which are easier for Chuck to patch over: the rest of the Destiel stuff in the remaining books would be what we already write about ourselves (e.g. 5x03’s lolwut-ness, possible implied Endverse!Destiel, etc ( _I’ll Just Wait Here Then_ )). The only thing left to say is that because of the different footing on which you’re reading these relationships, reading season 5’s books, Dean and Cas go into it as the surviving relationship, which ran very much more reminiscent of Sam/Ruby in the past thanks to the changes in that dynamic, but turned out to be the good and much more hard-won relationship in the end. Now, if Sam was getting more demony from prolonged contact to Ruby specifically bolstered by hot demon sex… go wild on the Supernatural books’ forums with theories about Cas going more and more human over season 5 and specifically on him being fully human in The End. You can’t spell subtext without it. ;)

So all in all I think the book!fandom’s slash shippers are working on a different footing from us, and I think they actually have  _more_  to work with than we do… And so we finally get back to the title of this atrocity, which is Charlie’s summary of Cas to Dean based off what she read. Who knows what she was thinking when she glanced over at Dean to voice her opinion on his relationship with Cas.

(Clue: probably not this. None of this.)


	2. Some Thoughts On Cas x Anna x Dean In Season 4

> Anonymous asked:
> 
> HOLY TRINITY- ehem, I mean, wow! Interestingly enough, you could say the handprint was painted in an erotic light since the beginning w/ Pam grabbing Dean's junk b4 his shoulder, implying the creature had touched him there,too. Now all I can think about is maybe Anna's interest in Dean wasn't bc he was Heaven's chosen, but bc he was the 1 Cas had saved, left his mark on & protected?Or maybe she was thinking that would've been her mark if she hadn't fallen, who knows? I think they wanted it to be much more of a love triangle than it ended up being, since Anna’s involvement w/ Dean & the plot changed. I dunno if it’s only my asexual self who feels this, but I couldn’t feel any real chemistry at least of a sexual nature between Anna and, well, anybody? Even in fic, Anna x Ruby makes more sense to me than Dean x Anna, oops. Maybe it was just eclipsed by Jensen & Misha’s outrageous chemistry on all fronts that made one look from Cas seem more steamy than a sex scene with literal steam XD

* * *

Hah. :P

I likewise didn’t really feel like Anna and Dean had much sexual chemistry, but they had emotional chemistry and it didn’t feel forced or out of character to me - they both wanted and needed it at the time. I guess you could say it was very friend with benefits though. He was very sweet and protective to her while she was human, but because of the focus on the action there was very little tropey falling in love OR making lustful faces at each other in the very obvious way hook ups can be flagged in TV and film, basically just a few conversations where they emotionally bonded - it would have been equally valid just as making friends to me.

… And yeah, okay, the hand print had its erotic connections from the start, so that just doubled up on it. Thanks. >.> Now I feel pretty confident saying it’s not the people touching it, it’s the thing itself. :P I mean Dean also refers to it as being “groped” by an angel (a step up from the “touched by an angel” reference he was making). 4x01 had a ton of oddly sexual comments (e.g. Dean suggesting he was saved from Hell for his perky nipples :P) linking Dean and his mysterious rescuer.

I did wonder if some of the intent was that Anna and Dean hooked up for the sake of using the hand print like that so it could be shown on screen… I said somewhere in my rewatch for 4x10 about that that it did feel like she randomly showed up to hook up with Dean to fill in a gap in the Dean x Heaven storyline that Ruby filled for Sam in the Sam x Hell storyline where they needed a sexual encounter to go with it. I’m guessing because the Sam x Ruby story was kind of inevitably going to be turned sexual because of all the various plot elements basically making it, in the expected way these things go, probably quite strange if they didn’t end up sexually connected thanks to all the seduction to the darkside stuff going on. 

Dean ran a parallel story to Sam through the season and Cas and Ruby took opposite ends of the bro fight of the season, but then they wouldn’t show Dean n Cas hooking up to parallel Sam and Ruby’s hook up, so Anna conveniently pops up and Cas is present through the hand print’s use in the scene.

* * *

 

Re: Anna stealing Cas's arc or Cas stealing Anna's arc or any other such thing:

justanotheridijiton found these interviews:

<https://www.tvguide.com/g00/news/supernatural-preview-angels-66904/>

> **TVGuide.com** :  _Do angels Castiel and Uriel make their intentions clear, or is their agenda sort of sprung on Anna?_
> 
> **McNiven** : In my first episode [of two], they just come out and say it. That’s when you realize I’m stuck in the middle of a horrible situation. Of course, Sam and Dean are then stuck in the middle, too, so they try to find us a way out of it.
> 
> ——
> 
> **TVGuide.com** :  _I take it that Supernatural offered you a “slightly” different experience than secretarying at Sterling Cooper?_
> 
> **McNiven** : [Laughs] Uh, yeah. Definitely. It was nice because for me as an actress still at an early stage in her career, I felt like I could really bite into this role. I was given an arc with a beginning, middle and an end.

<http://www.thewinchesterfamilybusiness.com/archive-articles/69-interviews/16271-exclusive-interview-with-julie-mcniven>

> How did you hear about the role of Anna Milton? Did you know the character was going to be an angel? If so, did that change your approach to the interview?
> 
> I got the audition through my agent and originally she was only in the first two episodes, ascending back to heaven at the end. I knew at the callback that she was an angel, but it didn’t really change my approach. Whether she was a human, angel, demon or vampire, I try to put the labels aside and just look at her given circumstances.

Both of which suggest her arc was self-contained at first, and that she was tentatively filling a 2 episode role. Given they then decided to bring her back but in the way we ended up with her, I don’t think there’s too much weight to the idea they intended her from the start to be as involved with Dean as, say, Ruby to Sam for the rest of the season, despite how those 2 episodes heavily used them to show the brothers in counterbalance to each other with their respective sides. Cas would have been also coming to the end of his original projected appearance, and so the idea to continue using them would have been made both at the same time, continuing Cas in the role he already had and Anna in the role she ended up having. 

I’m getting more and more unconvinced of the idea of Cas *stealing* Anna’s arc, rather than that Anna was brought back but just wasn’t utilised for a more involved role after her initial appearance which is disappointing in its own way for the show’s use of female characters but slightly less conspiracy theory-ish. Cas already had precedence as a character, and stronger ties to Dean in the story, seeing as he was Exposition Angel through the opening and they were building consistently the idea of him expressing doubts and drawing closer to Dean even in those early episodes: Dean was already HAVING an arc with an angel by the time Anna showed up, and while she  _may_  have been intended to supplant Cas if they liked her enough (more than Misha I guess - the other reason I don’t like this is because it becomes a popularity contest :P), given how 4x10 wrapped up they left themselves very open to bringing her back or not at all if they couldn’t be bothered, OR bringing her back in a different vessel (so Julie at least won that stage of the popularity contest >.>).

There’s nothing to say that this was what they were idly thinking about using her for, but there’s nothing to suggest there was a set in stone idea she’d take over Cas’s place for the rest of the season after her introduction, and so I think “changed the story” may be a little strong, because we know even with the long arcs planned for Kripke Era they were still pantsing it on all the details. Cas and/or Anna weren’t strictly necessary to the main arcs, either of them, but they decided to keep using them over and over, and Anna lost out in priority.

I dunno, the idea that Cas is expressly filling a gap hollowed out for a love interest seems a bit far to me EVEN WHEN I’m wondering loudly about the ongoing subtext of the season.

I think Ruby and Cas had parallels especially in their introductions, some of which from these seasons is visually covered here:

<http://justanotheridijiton.tumblr.com/post/126539913049/memitims-ruby-castiel-parallels-part-one-part>

<http://justanotheridijiton.tumblr.com/post/126539922054/memitims-ruby-castiel-parallels-part-two-part>

and narratively they filled a certain role as well. If you take Ruby’s season 3 arc and lay it over Cas’s season 4 arc in terms of relationship to their designated Winchester there’s some hefty overlap. And the opening of season 4 is strong enough to build a divide between Sam and Dean with Ruby and Cas either end - 4x03/4x04 show the battle lines already drawn which play throughout the season. 4x01/4x02 also parallel Sam alone with Ruby discussing their future over the season in tandem to Cas meeting Dean alone and setting up Dean’s relationship to Heaven (and Cas) for the season.

So by the time Anna shows up, Cas is already filling a narrative role coherent with what he goes on to do for the rest of the season. However it was meant to go from there, if we’re looking at it just from the angle of the erotic relationship between Sam x Hell and Dean x Heaven, Anna is an interjection, not a start point, for the simple fact Cas was introduced in episode 1 and she in episode 9. There’s already been stuff laid on heavily about Cas in the first couple of episodes, and the use of the hand print ties Anna in to the existing narrative. 

Even if the idea of a love interest was started there and was *meant* to continue for the whole season which then Cas did instead, they kicked it off with Anna doing that symbolic touch, which sort of feels to me that if Cas then disappeared and Anna continued in his place, she’d be picking up from Cas’s story and the car scene would show clearly how she is placing herself over Cas’s place in the narrative with that touch. As it was, she didn’t have any more meaningful interaction with Dean, and Cas did, and so her use in the narrative that we actually got instead of any speculative season, was this interjection of Dean’s relationship to Heaven being given a sexual encounter, tied in to Cas through the hand print.

I think it can make sense however you look at it basically, including without looking too deeply into what could have/should have/would have happened if not this.

It just feels to me like the Dean/Cas relationship is talked down or devalued by “oh well it just looks that way because…” when people use this argument and there is a lot more to it, not least the fact that all these hypothetical discussions are interesting and all, but there’s the real season we actually got left to poke at and its meaning and happenings are the story that actually happened. :P I’m starting to wonder if I’ve ever seen a discussion of Dean x Anna and Destiel in season 4 which DIDN’T use this line of thought along the way to justify or explain stuff, as if there is no worth in looking at the story without all these metatextual explanations, like they somehow undermine the story that was eventually chosen to be told, or are the ONLY way to support it.

* * *

> Anonymous asked:
> 
>  
> 
> Considering what we know now of Cas' past, I like to think he used to be much closer to Anna than we might deduce from their interactions in s4. Anna seems much warmer towards him and willing to recreate the bond they had before she fell (Anna touching his hand comes to mind, offering advice when he needs it), but Cas is having none of it & is quick to show his contempt. Back then I thought s4!Cas was just disgusted at an angel who chose to fall, but now I wonder if it wasn't a deeper betrayal fuelling his harshness, b/c both shared a rebellious spirit & “too much heart”, as other angels would put it, a love of humanity that got them into trouble with Naomi for bending the rules more than once I’d bet. I think he got out of several brainwashings b/c of Anna, having his commander on his side was a great help, so I think he felt the abandonment the most acutely when she fell, b/c she didn’t just turn her back on her kind, she turned her back on him too. I wonder if she found out Heaven’s plans 4 the Apocalypse & noped out, confident Cas would follow her. Which is why I think Heaven’s higher ups kept Cas in the dark for so long about their true purpose with the Winchesters, their fears proven right when Cas’ first move was to sneakily arrange a clandestine meeting with Dean, giving them no choice but to snag him for a reprogramming. The heartbreaking part is Cas is the reason Anna is caught & sent to reboot camp :( UGH, sorry i have too many feels & headcanons about them 

* * *

 

(Oops I wanted to watch the last interaction with Cas and Anna where he dobs her in in 4x21 and that was only 5 minutes away on my rewatch, but then I hit the wall for today and ran out of energy and now it’s been like 3 hours since I got these messages)

I really like their relationship and I think we can already deduce a lot about how close they were so thinking they were best friends is awful! Anna is so concerned for him and he’s so obviously affected and upset by her being fallen and a rebel angel. I love the idea that she maybe tried to convince him to fall before (fall with her!) and that’s why he recoils so much from her, because he knows exactly how committed to the idea she is (since she actually went through with it when he didn’t) and so he’s scared she really could talk him into disobedience at the worst time when he’s going through so much that season.

It’s so sad in their last scene, because he obviously really really regrets it even before she shows up, and he just looks so heartbroken having to do it. They obviously used him as a trap for Anna… But she KNEW he’d been dragged up to Heaven for reprogramming and that he was running around doing things like letting Sam out so he was definitely acting on Heaven’s orders. Maybe she was hoping she could try and talk him out of it again - get him back to how he was by the end of 4x16 because he’d been on his little discovery arc and found out how the system was rotten.

Except he’d already called the angels to come grab her, and was just waiting around for her to show up, so all he could do was say over and over how she shouldn’t have come, because he wasn’t able to listen, and there was nothing she could do this time. :(

Ugh. I’m so sad about them today. Worst timed message.

Or best.

  


 

Also, and I KNOW I am harping on this so this is just me and this is not many people’s cup of tea and I need to put an upfront disclaimer that at least season 4 never really ever stresses the angels as siblings thing (which is rarely in the text and basically the archangels are the main bulk of it and then later seasons it comes across more in general), but historical Cas x Anna honestly has a little suggestion in the text of season 4 and it FASCINATES me this time around. It’s really small and obviously later canon makes it clear this wasn’t a major thing because Cas has no serious past attachments when actually asked about it (unless he was just pining for Anna for millennia without them ever acting on it).

If you interpret 4x10 through that lens and think about Anna trying to convince Cas to fall with her but then he didn’t do it (but her reasons for falling included the possibility of romance) you basically have him rejecting her out of fear or not liking her ENOUGH to do such a thing (which is hilarious that he then falls for Dean within a year of meeting him :P) and it makes their interactions so bittersweet.

And of course I am still harping on the handprint thing! Argh! Because it makes it SUCH a Dean x Anna x Cas thing it’s ridiculous. I never really see this OT3 discussed because the angels as siblings thing got so much traction, and then in fan fic Anna is used as Cas’s sister SO MUCH that at this point even if it was very clear they were not siblings it would squick the fandom out on principle. It squicks me out a bit just from the over-use of the fan fic trope and I know there’s no basis in it from the text of season 4.

But that scene in the Impala where Anna puts her hand over the handprint is just so wildly suggestive of this dynamic I basically credit it with most of my early Destiel shipping, just because it turned the handprint really erotic (in a sort of “by extension of Anna & Dean, Dean & Cas” way) and it felt like Cas was very much a 3rd point of a triangle in that moment, along with some of his looks at Dean/Anna at the end of the episode (and her touching his hand in 4x16). 

I dunno, when I’m thinking about season 4 context and subtext it’s very interesting. Any wider context in the show or fandom I’m like “Nope. Definitely not.” I don’t think I’d even be comfortable reading any fanfic even in this context.

But the subtext fascinates me.

* * *

 

 

Here’s another gifset I mostly feel I owed myself from my big meta rewatch, and I’ve got comments and long rambles about this scattered all over my blog, but I wanted the visual guide to it and sometimes you just gotta make it yourself when no one else has your specific obsession with a thing that really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme. But it was just the Destielversary so why not celebrate it by writing about something no one wants to think about :P

In this case, mostly because I’ve got a big suspicious squint in the direction of the loose idea that once upon a time before anything else was a thing and they were just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck still, Anna and Cas may have been intended to have a romantic history, and this was a love triangle.

There’s good explanations which don’t involve this of all the individual things, but let’s skip ahead to start where my side-eyeing gets really intense, and the bit where Anna puts her hand over the handprint when she and Dean are hooking up as my sort of way in/key/the one thing that really stands out to me as something inexplicable and fascinating about this dynamic. I do LIKE the explanations of why else she might have done it, to do with Dean and her fascination with him and the connection she feels to him, which is established as his name being the first thing she heard when this all kicked off. Of course, it takes 3 to party, and Cas was busy pulling Dean out of hell at that point and being the one to leave the handprint in the first place. Or in layman’s terms, “dibs”.

As a Destiel moment (which the later way it’s firmly established there’s a lack of Cas historically having anything romantic/sexual with anyone, does to this), it’s also fascinating to me that Anna doing that brings Cas into the scene, draws the connection between herself and him - as the angel, the one touching Dean on the shoulder. Her own motivations for doing it and placing her hand over the imprint of Cas’s hand are fascinating to me to wonder if that was all she was thinking, though, or if she’s sharing a connection with him there that’s nostalgic and strange, as if putting her hand over his, and Dean is just the medium for it (which of course also nicely flips how if you take this as a face on Destiel moment, Anna is just the medium for the moment and I don’t like using female characters like that so it’s nice to at least turn it on Dean for an alternative :P).

But thinking of mediums, now we can backtrack to the start. Pamela’s comment is one of like a dozen through that episode which sexualise the whatever happened to Dean by the whoever did it to him, when it’s all a mystery. Goes right in the box with Dean joking he got rescued because of his perky nipples. And of course a lot of his language has shades of non-con to it because, well, he just got back from hell, a demon “riding him out” is probably the least bad thing to happen to him up to that point >.> Anyways, that’s also random other context I just wanted to clarify instead of wading right in to talking about how her comment and groping does turn the handprint itself into a sort of sexual innuendo about Cas’s touch - and Dean makes bitter jokes about being “groped by an angel” in 4x02 once he knows what did it.

In any case, I think the 4x01 stuff is mostly serving as a contrast as a worst case scenario and the expectation that whatever pulled Dean out of Hell would be a demon or another big big bad, and Cas being so equivocally *not* any of what they were imagining right down to his nerdy looks and disinterest in sex, defuses this. Buuut the handprint is more than just these moments in 4x01, and Pamela doesn’t even grab Dean there, she grabs his leg under the table… The tone immediately changes IN the scene to being more serious and dramatic, and we get Sam’s shocked reaction to seeing the handprint for the first time too, and then Pamela seriously touches it. There’s emotional weight to it but there’s also the lingering implication from all the things said about the mystery Castiel that still kinda makes the way they talk and think about it have some low key erotic feeling - again, Dean is still using his “touched by an angel” reference when he knows what Cas is to continue to imply more than what really happened.

And of course because of Anna touching it in the car scene in 4x10 then it is tied right back into this sort of weird symbolic significance about Dean, about Cas, about the feelings being exchanged in this moment, and that’s inevitably also about, uh, other exchanges between Dean and Anna. And that’s mostly Dean’s part in what interests me here.

In the 2nd gif, from the opening of 4x10, I found Cas’s reaction fascinating when Uriel was saying this line about Anna. This is his reaction to what Anna explains later as the “murder one”, of falling, of wanting to experience ~human things~ like sex and chocolate cake. I mean in many ways it’s interesting just because he has a reaction and they chose to show it to these things, but getting a lot more attention in fandom is the gif of Cas looking away at the end of the episode.

That one seems to generally be read as him looking away because Dean and Anna kiss, and though I didn’t want to unnecessarily pad the gifset with it, there’s actually 4 shots that interest me - Anna kissing Dean, Cas watching WITHOUT looking away (although perturbed) and then Anna leaning back and saying the line to Dean about forgiving him, and THEN Cas looks away (I honestly don’t know if she’s in on the ruse or not but the important thing is Cas is fooled in that moment or is reacting genuinely but he has no clue of the difference so I don’t need to account for any :P). 

I think there’s something interesting in the thought that Cas is reacting more to Anna in the context of not liking hearing Uriel comparing her to Ruby, sure, but also not liking to think of her IN a sexual context, as Uriel is implying, well, even before she meets them she’s clearly not a virgin by her comments on being human. And in the end of the episode, Cas is reacting again not just to Anna smooching Dean (although tbh that is such a dodgy shot to include if you don’t want people to think he’s jealous of SOMEONE and see above retcons for the handprint scene once Cas is established later of never having a past love interest and therefore no “cloud seeding” as Dean delightfully (grossly) puts it in 5x03 with Anna….) but he’s also reacting to her comment about forgiveness. 

I think it’s interesting to think about Cas vs complex nuanced emotions that would all be very very bad to engage with as an angel supposed to be following orders - being able to see beyond duty and actions done on orders to Anna forgiving Dean for selling her out because she understands - and to be able to issue forgiveness, and to paint Dean’s actions as horrible and the ones that need forgiving and understanding, when they are seemingly acquiescing with the orders Cas has been given? Oh she is sowing doubt in his head, but also demonstrating in front of Cas and Uriel her own humanity - flaunting it to them that she has these capabilities and emotional understanding, and *this* is what she has gained. (The fact she was their superior once and therefore someone they should have followed unquestioningly is also another subtle dig she can make by forgiving Dean, like she might still lead by example.) Of course, then to go on and offer it to Cas in 4x16.

However you shake it she’s making Cas react with all the bottled up doubt and confusion he’s admitted to having previously to Dean, and she’s using Dean to get at him. With hindsight all the way from 12x10 knowing that angels have a ~most sacred oath~ not to go around lying with humans, and Anna’s comments about their “murder one” we have nearly the entire history of angels on the show bracketed by comments about how forbidden it is to dabble in what she did, and Cas is the one being contrasted to this. Anna also lashes out on 2 points, that she “knows how their minds work,” a good early allusion to them being predictable and programmed, which obviously seems more powerful once we know how true that is from like, season 8 onwards, and that Cas can’t mean it when he says sorry, because he doesn’t know how - something he has to learn along the way, and I am reeeally not going to get distracted into talking about 7x21 because that “playing Sorry!” thing is just *clenches fist and stares out of the window mournfully*

This also leads us to my last couple of gifs, where Anna is challenging Cas in 4x16, telling him that what he feels is doubt (again - known it since 4x07 when he told Dean in confidence) and trying to play on it to get him to do the right thing. And here’s the last thing that makes me wonder hard about what sort of backstory was originally implied between Cas and Anna, because she has a very tactile approach to convincing him, and touching his hand, then grasping it harder, before a final shot of Cas yanking his hand away, is used to show very clearly her steps in trying to manipulate him (you know, in a kind way towards the Cas we want and are rooting for :P) by this emotional connection. And, of course, this links back to what I was saying about the handprint in the car scene - of Anna connecting to Cas through touching it, of drawing his hand into that scene. Of using her own touch to try and save Cas from his programming. She comes on too strong - it’s too urgent a situation with Dean in the next room smashing away his own soul as he tortures Alastair - and Cas finally can’t listen to any more, and snatches his hand away, horrified at the implication he’s *like her*, because if he’s like her, well… At that point it is probably his worst fear, that his doubts will drive him down this path.

(I mean, he IS. And the next half of the episode goes on to show him asking her for help, her telling him to think for himself, and Cas really truly starting his journey of being OUR Cas, taking his baby steps into free will…But yeah, anyway, I don’t care about that for the sake of this post :P I just care about them all touching hands and stuff. :P)

I also think, and I cba to go gif anything on yet another DVD, that obviously Anna trying to win over Cas here links to 4x22 and Cas being helpfully brainwashed so Dean can get another go at it as well to more dramatic effect of convincing Cas to disobey orders on his behalf (and the behalf of the world) - yet another thing he and Anna share in relation to Cas. For him it’s all manly punching to “communicate” with Cas in that scene, buuut there is the great shoulder grab where he turns Cas around, and there is the immortal fandom gif where they made all the colour appear as Cas turns. [And then there’s the stuff I said on this gifset](https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/126904620188/venusdebotticelli-dean-and-cas-in-season-10) which as I didn’t allude to very clearly at the top of this post, was when I stopped using the “elbow fetish” tag as a joke and accidentally ended up with it as one of my major meta tags, so thanks for that Dean >.> This was linking shoulder touch to shoulder touch - Dean starts the season being yanked out of Hell by Cas on his shoulder, and in the end of the season convinces Cas to fall from Heaven for him in a fight where he yanks Cas around by the shoulder. So there’s links and parallels in all the situations, and touches, and I think with or without this theory about Cas and Anna’s non-backstory, plenty of romantic coding.

I’ve never really noticed anything else in other episodes which might link Cas and Anna and I’ve rewatched season 4 many times wondering about this exact thing just because the weirdness of the touch in the car scene gets me going every time - obviously nothing in 5x13 which is way past Cas confirming he’s had no relationships in the past - and this is pretty scant stuff to start with, which is why I think it was nothing more than a loose idea to maybe connect them some more, because Cas and Anna were the two key angels at this point in the season, and it’s an easy way to build more into their dynamic if they had developed Anna more. (And it probably would have been from her side and I assume this is the version where Cas was killed off and Anna endured.) 

And I will be honest, my main interest in it IS because of what happens when you then delete any possible intent of Cas and Anna meaning anything to the narrative, to the point of it not even really being something obvious to think about from the story we got, leaving the touches and links in the character dynamics of the love triangle as a strange little relic that ties Dean and Cas closely together in a way where Anna really is mostly just a proxy for their feelings and the way Sam and Dean ran parallel stories of their connection to Heaven and Hell that year, and Anna shows up with *suspicious* timing for when Sam is shown on screen hooking up with Ruby, in order to balance the equation with Dean (is that what the kids are calling it these days). 

I’m never not going to find it fascinating Anna brought Cas into her hook up with Dean by that touch, and to me that creates this entire web of the first sort of Destiel subtext, with just some nice symbolism and connections, where there’s definitely a whole bunch of erotic connotations between them as a result of all this.

 


	3. Cas as a John Mirror in Early Season 4

> **Anonymous**  asked:
> 
> I was thinking about the similarities between season 4 Cas and John Winchester. Both characters seem to want to inhabit a black and white morality, were soldiers that fought in wars (which I would argue is different from hunting), and were willing to make almost any sacrifice in the name of the mission. The difference between them of course being that these aspects of Cas are systematically broken down. I was just wondering if you thought Cas' character in any way functions as a sort of mirror version of John’s character? 

* * *

 

Yes! I think you basically lay out everything in miniature, but I would like to offer some visual evidence to go with it, from right at the start of Cas’s arc:

  
  


([screencaps from HotN](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.homeofthenutty.com%2Fsupernatural%2Fscreencaps%2Fthumbnails.php%3Falbum%3D63%26page%3D2&t=NGFhNTllOWNhZDAwYWQ2NWIxN2ZmNGU3ZDJmMDQzMDBjYTczYzJiOCxhUnhndktyVg%3D%3D&b=t%3AEoTmUHpiEEiE91JGAXVv3Q&p=https%3A%2F%2Felizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F156225971703%2Fi-was-thinking-about-the-similarities-between&m=1))

There’s just something really neat about him chasing after John and finding Cas instead, when it comes to almost showing Cas in John’s place or something with the way he can pop up like that.

I kind of think because of this initial comparison and knowing that Cas wasn’t originally meant to get super far in the show, that he would be, I guess, the representation of Heaven with God as the bad father figure who was set up to mirror John so well. Dean’s issues with Cas would be that he showed up with a bunch of orders from Heaven, but even by 4x07 the orders are to follow Dean, and Cas breaks open a little bit to talk to Dean honestly about how he has his own doubts, and that immediately takes him down from that place and puts him on Dean’s level, and it’s so early on they give Cas an obvious, well, uh, crack in the chassis, that they can’t keep using him like that because he’s now got that room for relatable character development to us, and relatable attributes for Dean to start latching onto and befriending him. Uriel is introduced in the episode as a much more hardline angel, which also takes heat off Cas even if he’s still Uriel’s superior at that point, because now we have an even clearer idea that Cas is going to move away from this.

Of course Cas keeps the issues that come with this, but then it’s more like Dean, struggling against programming to be a good little soldier, and all the issues that come with their absent fathers (which probably isn’t EVERY conversation they have in season 5 but suddenly feels like it when I look back on it :P). Since I’ve been rewatching season 6 lately… Dean acts like John sometimes (and hates it) when he’s trying to protect Lisa and Ben, and worries that he’s going to become John. In the same season, Cas is struggling to protect the people he loves (watching Dean rake leaves) and takes on extreme measures to protect him, and ends up becoming HIS father, literally. He plays out on a grand scale, Dean’s issues.

I mean never mind all the stuff with Chuck at the end of season 11, where Cas ignored him completely, and Dean took him to task so hard he got accused of projecting onto Chuck about his issues… (Thanks, Chuck :P) Anyway, huge emotional overlap there. 

I also think Dean has tried to be like John enough, back in season 1, that if you revisit season 1 episodes and look at him struggling with that, I feel like even Cas in the first couple of episodes of season 4 could be read as projecting the same facade as Dean does in season 1. We don’t know HOW long he had doubts (though we may be about to find out :P) except I suspect for basically ever because of Naomi - it’s just Dean kicked him into gear to do something about it this time.

Anyway, sorry for rambling so long :P I totally agree with you that he initially can and probably was meant to be seen as a mirror to John (especially as it seemed like he was being set up to keep popping up at random with orders for Dean and being really unpredictable/unreliable about that in the same way John in season 1 was so infuriating to get hold of but sent them random orders all the time), but Cas starts to grow and change so quickly that I definitely feel that while that continues for a while with the orders (up to 4x15 before 4x16 breaks him :P) his actually character arc starts around 4x07 and after that he’s clearly meant to be a Dean mirror instead, because the specific way of saying he has doubts about the higher powers he answers to is exactly the feeling Dean had and barely got to express while John was alive (and STILL struggles with even years later, when they stumble over stuff like 9x07)… So when it comes to Dean and Cas relating to each other and the emotional arc they were on, I definitely think it stops being like Cas is going to be a John mirror to him after 4x03.


	4. Rewatching Thoughts on 4x04-4x09

I have a long list of meta things from 4x04-9...

 

although one of the notes is “gif the dracula running chased by dean and then the yorkie running after Dean”

  
The other is a list of 3 things that make excellent Destiel meta out of this chunk of episodes

I wanted to line up Dean opening up to Jamie vs Dean opening up in the confessional in 10x16 because I realised how much Dean is talking about Cas  
in the first one, and it felt the same sort of thing but in the totally opposite direction:

4x05:

> JAMIE  
> Wow.  
> DEAN  
> What?  
> JAMIE  
> That must suck. I mean, you’re giving up your life for this terrible… I don’t know, responsibility.  
> DEAN  
> Last few years, I started thinking that way, and, uh, it started sort of weighing on me. Of course, that was before… A little while ago, I had this – let’s call it a near-death experience. Very near.  
> And, uh, when I came to… things were different. My life’s been different. I realize that I help people. Not just help them, though. I save them. I guess it’s – it’s awesome. It’s kind of like a gift… like a mission. Kind of like a… a mission from God.

10x16:

> DEAN  
> What if I said I…I didn’t want to die…yet, you know, that I wasn’t ready?  
> FATHER DELANEY  
> Are you expecting to?  
> DEAN  
> Always. [Chuckles] You know, the life I live, the work I do…I pretty much just figured that that was all there was to me, you know? Tear around and jam the key in the ignition and haul ass until I ran out of gas. I guess I just thought sooner or later, I’d go out the same way that I live – pedal to the metal, and that would be it.  
> FATHER DELANEY  
> But now?  
> DEAN  
> Now, um… recent events, uh… make me think I might be closer to that than I really thought. And…I don’t know. I mean, you know, there’s – there’s things, there’s…people, feelings that I-I-I want to experience differently than I have before, or maybe even for the first time.  
> FATHER DELANEY  
> Go a little deeper, perhaps, than with Gina.  
> DEAN  
> Yeah. Yeah, I’m just starting to think that… maybe there’s more to it all than I thought.  
> FATHER DELANEY  
> Learning there’s more to the universe than your tiny world can be a frightening discovery. Do you truly believe in God, Agent? Because that can be a comfort  
> DEAN  
> I believe there is a God. But I’m not sure he still believes in us.

One talking himself back into being a hunter because he suddenly felt like he had a mission from god, in that narrow little window where it seemed like a good thing (and the hunter in 4x04 says he’d do anything not to have to do this when he’s hunting the guy and his wife and dies horribly for it because he’s being insincere but Cas MEANS it), and then down the other end of the line, where he had a very different little window that felt like it was closing rapidly for him.

In season 10 he’s talking himself back out into wanting MORE after he’s telling Jamie that he DOESN’T think his life sucks, after she says it must be lonely and horrible (he’s just come back from hell, he KNOWS lonely and horrible) then he goes and admits 6 years later that it IS lonely and horrible and he want more. In 4x05 his reasoning for not wanting more is because of the new faith Cas gave him -the feeling maybe he came back for good reasons and that maybe he can trust that he has a mission. (Cas really got to him with 4x03 because of how he uses “Cas sed” on Sam in 4x04’s argument).

I don’t think we really talk much about Dean’s little bubble of faith and optimism specifically caused by Cas... I find it fascinating but it’s over so quickly. Everything Dean says in 4x02 is repeated in 11x21 to Chuck’s face. He had already worked through all that to allow himself to believe in Cas, and of course their faith doesn't get fully crushed until 5x16.

WAIT ALSO: if Cas more accurately represents Heaven and God to Dean in this specific bubble of optimism period, I had intense Feels about him clutching the bible in 4x06 to his face like that. Same deal as the Jamie conversation: Cas represents this because Cas is who Dean has talked to and bonded with. He's warming up to the idea of God because of Cas but meets Uriel and it's like WOW ANGELS ARE DICKS. Glad my angel is nice.

* * *

 

Also, I feel really weird like no one I’ve ever seen has compared 4x07 and the witches to the Lucifer endgame. It's literally a spell killing people (breaking seals) then they think it’s the witch and killing her will stop “Sam Hain”.

But then it all gets turned around, and they kill the guy, killing the witch didn’t stop him from breaking out, it freed him. And WHOOPS: “Sam Hain” rises and possesses the guy. He even comes out of a crack in the floor in a crypt.

And “Sam Hain” (the pronunciation makes him a parallel) is wearing a white shirt and then Sam is wearing his awful white shirt at the end of the episode, plus they both have the shaggy hair although this might be getting more abstract. :P

* * *

My last note is that my heart shattered when Dean commented at the wishing well that he thought Sam would make the 2x20 wish, and Sam wants Lilith’s head on a plate, bloody.

Sam says he’s not that guy any more, but it’s a loss of hope and the subtle theme of embracing being the monster: 4x04 he embraces being the monster, 4x05 the monster theme is… subtle but there if you squint. 4x06 Dean sees Sam as potentially and terrifyingly the monster, right down to the yellow eyes, 4x07 the “Sam Hain” parallel and Sam embraces his powers to exorcise him, and 4x08 Sam sees himself only wishing for revenge and blood and not longer being a guy who wants anything else.

Even though in 2x20 Dean wasn’t exactly someone who just _was_ the AU Dean at heart, the whole point was he was in a different life. Sam can’t even conceptualise being a different person or wishing for peace and happiness even though he's lived closer to it and had normal people life goals in the past. It’s worse than season 10 Dean, honestly. At least he wanted to go to the beach and WISHED he could have more although he didn’t see a way out and was sad he wasn’t gonna get “Gina”.

Even in early season 4 Sam’s kinda lost, and I mean lost as in needs Chuck’s squeegee clean up to even start to have a chance to redeem himself. It seems he can’t see a way past being what he is and has subtly already embraced being the “whole new level of freak” and that the demon blood is there. Might as well use it and be who he’s supposed to be. Like, Ruby did all that between season 3 and 4 so there was no way Dean was ever going to talk him back. Giving in to the powers and believing he can use them for good, to save people, is better than being a useless freak. It was so tempting for him to believe that he could control it in some way.

It’s horrifying to rewatch and realise how annoyingly right Dean is about literally everything. Like as soon as you know he was right about Ruby everything he says is so painfully true.

Anyway Sam says he’s saved more people in the last few months than they have in years and dean’s like, is that what ruby wants you to think? And…  yeah, it is. Sam’s already like 90% brainwashed when you got back from Hell.


	5. Does Cas Really Not Look At Dean While Dean's Speaking?

> **Anonymous**  asked:
> 
> Does Cas really not look at Dean while Dean's speaking? I was surprised to hear Jensen complaining about that in a con 'cause I thought it was impossible to stare at another person more than Cas does to Dean. My memory is fuzzy tho. So far from your rewatch, does Cas have trouble with looking at Dean while he's speaking?

* * *

Yes and no. 

I definitely don’t think it’s that he has “trouble” with it, either.

Cas tends to talk off into the distance or not look at Dean when they’re discussing random plot stuff, but as soon as it gets personal they’re right up in each other’s faces. 

Let’s go with 4x18 since that’s the most recent one I watched with actual Cas (I was just sobbing about how Dean can’t look at Jimmy in 4x20 :P)

(Lazily stealing screencaps from [Home of the Nutty](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.homeofthenutty.com%2Fsupernatural%2Fscreencaps%2Findex.php%3Fcat%3D5&t=MGVlMDZjYzNkNmFjNzEyYzY2NTdhY2JhNzE0YjkwMjU1ODE0MDgzZCxzNUxEUkFIYQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AEoTmUHpiEEiE91JGAXVv3Q&p=https%3A%2F%2Felizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F126432383118%2Fdoes-cas-really-not-look-at-dean-while-deans&m=1) since I’ve got 4x20 paused on the other monitor and it’s the wrong disc :P)

When Cas shows up, he spends a good chunk of the initial conversation reading Scarecrow instead of looking at Dean, even while he’s explaining that Chuck is a prophet and related details:

  


And this isn’t even the first time that Cas has used a book to avoid eye contact this season:

(Which he does for several lines of dialogue and yet we know how that conversation ends up regarding close up stares. :P)

Eventually this gets too much for Chuck and he dashes out of the room, leaving Dean n Cas alone together. 

Within moments Cas puts the book down and doesn’t use it to distract himself again while they’re talking:

They continue to move around and Dean is the one who turns his back on Cas for dramatic effect in the middle of this part of the conversation, but they naturally turn to look at each other again with the ebb and flow of the dialogue. They have a pretty synchronised moment of turning to look at each other in them middle of the conversation, in fact.

In contrast, their conversation after Dean prays to him is pretty much entirely face to face, as it’s a pretty personal conversation, and when Cas is apparently just delivering exposition, he’s sneaking in the clue for how to stop Lilith in his facial expressions, making it a rare instance where he’s just saying plot stuff but actually talking to Dean eye to eye because there’s a personal reason to be doing so.

One of the other things Cas does that helps give this no eye contact impression is just that he does not immediately try to capture eye contact when he is talking to someone, even when it’s important. So when he has his realisation that he wants to help Dean and works out how to deliver the information to help him, he does not turn around immediately. You can see in this screen shot Dean is blurry in the background behind him having started to storm off in despair:

Cas says his name a couple of times and doesn’t do anything like turn urgently around and chase after Dean. ([you know, like this](http://some-people-call-it-tragic.tumblr.com/post/118915632921)) He just says his name and waits to re-capture Dean’s attention:

That doesn’t look like someone who urgently has something to say. AND YET.

Only after he has Dean’s interest again he turns back around and says what he has to say.

It’s all then down to Dean to walk back into Cas’s personal space and come to him for the conversation, and they end up this close together all on Dean’s motivation while Cas just stands there:

A great deal of Cas’s blocking when they move around each other (and with other characters) ends up with him facing away and looking into the distance all the time. But it’s kind of a common thing anyway. For example On the Head of a Pin had Cas and Anna talking with him with his back to her for a significant chunk of dialogue in a way that almost felt like it was a stage production and they were adhering to that rule of never turning your back on the audience, even if it means having someone talk to you from behind and you reply into the auditorium instead of just looking over your shoulder. 

There’s a lot of theatricality in it because having the characters stationary like you might have in a realistic conversation where people sit still and talk to each other is boring on the screen. If you have them moving around then they turn their backs on each other and then turn to look at each other at significant moments, which can be used to convey a lot, especially regarding motivation and emotion that would be guarded in the scene if they weren’t doing this.

4x16 is actually just beautiful for this all round - it seems like everyone is always looking over the other’s shoulder:

  
  
  
  
  


And in fact the odd ones out in this episode is that every time Cas is talking to Dean he by and large endeavours to make proper eye contact with him when it’s down to Cas rather than Dean moving away - even when Cas is sitting beside his bed and the chair is facing the same way Dean is lying, you can see he regularly glances of his shoulder at Dean while they talk, so he’s just sort of lazily not moving the chair around while still regularly at least looking at him.

I think it might be used in part to show some trust between the characters - Sam and Ruby face each other all through their scenes; Cas and Uriel talk face to face before Cas goes to investigate and discovers that Uriel betrayed him; Cas and Anna’s last conversation once he’s considering disobedience is face-to-face in contrast to the earlier one. When people are facing away, they’re obviously concealing what they feel. Not looking at each other while talking is something that happens all the time for dramatic effect on the show - the bit where Dean was telling Sam about what he remembered from Hell at long last, he spoke directly into the camera with Sam weirdly bobbing behind his shoulder. Again I think because Dean couldn’t face telling Sam while looking him in the eye, and so he could only say it by not looking at him.

There are loads of instances where Cas doesn’t seem to care for eye contact, but I don’t think he’s bad at it, so much as he uses it in very specific ways this early on. Cas has slightly different rules because he has a much lower tolerance for what is “worth” direct eye contact, so I don’t think he’s always concealing something either (except for the times when you can see there’s more emotion behind him than he’s “supposed” to be feeling in that moment) and so I think the impression we have of Dean n Cas staring at each other so much is because when it is earned, Cas is completely intense and all-in about it, and it’s surprising because he spends so much time not looking people in the eye, and actively avoiding eye contact. So Jensen can be grumpy he’s acting at the back of Misha’s head half the time because he really notices they’re not sharing eye contact naturally, and we enjoy the serious staring chemistry, because when it happens, it’s  _happening_.


	6. It was all a test in Kripke's Hollow

**Anonymous**  asked:

> Do you think Chuck purposefully wrote himself into the narrative in 4x18? Or was the prophecy sent by angels and Chuck just followed along?

* * *

I think so (that he did write himself in), although I haven’t been back to season 4 & 5 since season 11, so I can’t pick out any specific moments which really sell it with hindsight with the retcon… 

Maybe more using season 7 onwards continuity, we know prophets are chosen by God and very specifically picked and planned from the dawn of time. I still suspect if God became Chuck he either subtly re-wrote that from the start of time to make sure the angels (Metatron especially, who apparently was the one who wrote down the names of all the prophets) didn’t know Chuck and God were one and the same. Or he somehow possessed or supplanted the ~real~ Chuck to take the spot, just diving into the parking spot of the prophet who would have been activated during the apocalypse before they could get there. 

Like, there could and maybe should have been a Chuck who was not God who would have  _just_  been the prophet during that time, but I suspect he wouldn’t have meddled like Chuck did, if he ever would have known he was writing as a prophet… We know Chuck meddles in the plot so it would have been easy for him to knock over a few dominoes to set Sam and Dean on the path that took them to him… The “real” Chuck obviously wouldn’t have had the power to do that so you can imagine there’s an AU where God didn’t meddle and Sam and Dean never walked into that comic book shop, and never found out about the books, which would mean Chuck would never find out he was a prophet

(and he’d write a tale of apocalypse and doom and game over >.>)

Now that I’m thinking about it, 4x18 makes a lot MORE sense with Chuck as God if you assume it was all a test, and that he wanted to reach out to TFW and see if they’re viable playing pieces which could genuinely affect the outcome (I think he was probably grimly resigned to the apocalypse but very happy for another outcome to at least have a chance :P). This comes after 4x16, where Cas is set on his new path and for the first time is clearly now out of line with Heaven and questioning authority like he’s never done before. And after 4x17 which was a huge manipulation by Heaven of Dean and probably the strongest they’d come onto the story trying to openly force Sam and Dean around like chess pieces with a huge display of power and how they could  _make_  them do stuff. (And at the end of 4x18, Zachariah threatens Chuck to keep writing and that he’d never be allowed to stop, the same “we’d just bring you back” Sam gets over being Lucifer’s vessel, which shows Chuck how Heaven has clearly picked the No Free Will option)

So Chuck draws Sam and Dean and Lilith to town, destroys the road out of town, and gives Sam and Dean this predestined script which tricks Dean, who tries to defy it, into falling completely in line with what is Written - on the surface it seems a manipulation just like Zach the previous episode, proving their helplessness in the face of supposed Destiny. 

He also has that heart-to-heart with Sam, learning his motivations for drinking the demon blood and I think this exchange is one of the 2 huge moments from God’s perspective, this first one where he hears Sam out with what in retrospect is now the most important unburdening-infront-of-God moment in the whole show despite all the other times characters reach out and pray or go to confession boxes because this one time God talks back:

> SAM  
> It scares the hell out of me. I mean, I feel it inside of me. I… I wish to god I could stop. 

(God purifies him of the blood after 4x22, giving Sam a clean second chance in season 5)

 And then there’s the key theme for Sam that season of Sam’s feeling of strength vs seeing Dean as weak, which 4x16 again dragged right into the foreground:

> CHUCK  
> So you got to carry the weight?  
>   
> SAM  
> Well, he’s looked out for me my whole life. I can’t return the favor?  
>   
> CHUCK  
> Yeah, sure you can. I mean, if that’s what this is.  
>   
> SAM  
> What else would it be?  
>   
> CHUCK  
> I don’t know. Maybe the demon blood makes you feel stronger? More in control?  
>   
> SAM  
> No. That’s not true. 

If Sam’s genuinely honest (and he has to be because he thinks Chuck is at the very least psychic, would know he’s lying because he knows Sam-the-book-character inside out, and also is a “neutral” party yet someone who knows the full story and is only coming across mildly judgemental compared to how Sam’s immediate family would react, aka someone Sam can actually TALK to about this and he needs a sympathetic ear that season) then yeah at least on some levels as the text shows repeatedly - as a sign Sam is very far gone - that he feels stronger and likes that feeling etc, and measures Dean against him negatively, but there’s more to his character than that - if nothing else there’s wanting NOT to be that person, and the fact he genuinely believes he’s doing good, and God can’t tell him his actions will bring about the apocalypse, he can only weigh his heart on how Sam feels and acts as a character. So he sees that there is worth in Sam (hence: purifying him)

> CHUCK  
> I’m sorry, Sam. I know it’s a terrible burden – feeling that it all rests on your shoulders.  
>   
> SAM  
> Does it? All rest on my shoulders?  
>   
> CHUCK  
> That seems to be where the story’s headed. 

And then he ends up sympathetic to Sam’s plight, especially with his own knowledge as God that not even Chuck-the-prophet is supposed to have. And so on an emotional level he’s now sympathetic to one of the pawns of the apocalypse.

Then enter Cas and all that “just so you understand why I can’t help” nonsense, because again, on Dean and Cas’s side of the episode, Dean desperately prays upwards and it’s the first time he does that - he doesn’t know Cas will answer, but he seems to be yelling  _at God_. This little microcosm of the bigger problem episode basically pits Dean against a sure destiny, and Cas answers, is talked around by Dean in a mirror of their conversation in 4x22:

> DEAN  
> So, what – We’re just supposed to sit around and, and wait for it to happen?  
>   
> CASTIEL  
> I’m sorry.  
>   
> DEAN  
> Screw you. You and your mission. Your God. If you don’t help me now, then when the time comes and you need me… don’t bother knocking. 

vs

> DEAN  
> Get me to Sam. We can stop this before it’s too late.
> 
> CASTIEL  
> I do that, we will all be hunted. We’ll all be killed.
> 
> DEAN  
> If there is anything worth dying for… this is it.  
> (CASTIEL shakes his head and looks down)  
> You spineless…   
> (DEAN turns and walks away)   
> …soulless son of a bitch. What do you care about dying? You’re already dead. We’re done.

and then obviously both times Cas pulls through with giving Dean the info to ruin the “prophecy” from within, or just flat out rebelling to help him. 

And then that line he says to Sam about where the story is headed, obviously in 4x22 Cas has the answer for that:

> CHUCK  
> Yeah, but you guys aren’t supposed to be there. You’re not in this story.
> 
> CASTIEL  
> Yeah, well…  
> (he glances at DEAN)  
> We’re making it up as we go.

And of course then Chuck pretty much breaks character to give Cas that “good job, son,” shoulder pat before Raphael explodes him :P

To get back to 4x18, though, yeah, basically TFW pass Chuck’s tests with flying colours (Sam also doesn’t want to deal with Lilith despite the prophecy and attempts to trap and kill her while pretending to be dealing with her, his own way of working much more within the prophecy to subvert is, like he does with saying yes to Lucifer to end the apocalypse while Dean is never possessed by Michael and works outside the story still, since 5x22 is another “you aren’t supposed to be there” sort of thing) and I think after that obviously you have Chuck quietly stacking the odds just a liiittle bit more in their favour whenever he can because they’ve proven to him, all 3 of them, that they’re more than a match for the story as it’s SUPPOSED to happen. 

I guess now I’ve talked myself into thinking absolutely that Chuck could have decided to write himself into the story, not just for his own kicks, but because his curiosity about TFW moved him to see how they could handle it? It was a convenient way to make them run a little gauntlet to see how they handled it.


	7. Mary’s Upbringing and How Much Is She Like Dean?

**4x03**

Too tired to gif anything lengthy (or work out how to do these ones nicely and in 1 part) but when Mary and Samuel go to the farm to investigate, they have this little exchange:

> MARY  
> And I’m here because?
> 
> SAMUEL  
> Family business, Mary… family.
> 
> SAMUEL  
> What? You’d rather be waving pom-poms at a bunch of dumb jocks?

(The giffed smile is after he says that last line)

Anyway it just makes me really sad that this is the offered glimpse of Mary’s life specifically between her and Samuel and what we have to go off on how this works between the two of them aside from him laughing at John and calling him naive etc. This has John parenting Dean all over it, with the family business line as always harking back to the line indelibly connected to Dean’s speech in 1x02 because of how many episode openings it was pasted over, and I feel like it’s Dean especially, rather than Sam who DID openly want to rebel and live a normal life (and would relate a lot to this as well, of course) because it feels more like pre-knowing them stuff, the kind of thing that John telling Dean to take care of the car or he wouldn’t have given it to him in 1x20 for example feels like. The snide comments that police how they should feel about it and how Mary responds by snarking at him about going to do the job and putting on a smile and going to flirt information out of a boy at the farm. We don’t see comments like this really between John and Dean aside from the car one because in every respect in season 1 John has bought Dean’s loyalty fully already and since the very start that has been obvious - if little tells in 1x01 didn’t give it away, Dean’s behaviour in 1x02 standing up for the family business to Sam did.

I also have spent some time somewhere or other paralleling Mary & John to Dean & Lisa (I think the first post in this post-season 12 watch actually, where I wrote like 100 miles about Mary…) in the sense that she clawed her way to suburbia and went into a sort of denial - visually represented in 12x22 if you want to imagine she was doing the same thing the entire time she was playing housewife for real (and because she never learned to cook I find it particularly telling and distressing that it reads to me like she was in denial/depression about it rather than throwing herself wholeheartedly into learning an entire new life and genuinely trying to fit in with housewife culture of doing all the cooking etc… She still sneaked out to hunt and I still kinda feel like that was lashing out or rebellion against her own life, dissatisfaction being caught between two worlds, even self-sabotage to make John wonder if she was cheating, or just to indulge her secret other life or… you know, SOMETHING reckless and stupid when she had a baby at home to care for… Mary is NOT a stable person and I love her because she’s a hot mess :P). (The Dean & Lisa vs Mary & John parallel isn’t perfect but I’m talking specifically about mindsets and the djinn dream comparison Dean had to being with Lisa, and the deep deep place Mary went to in her head that reeks to me of similar minds.)

To me overall the Dean and Mary comparison is much stronger to me so though this makes a lot of sense as a Sam parallel (or, well, when it’s parents etc we just talk about inherited traits with a semi-mystical power to channel personality directly to us whether we knew our ancestors personally or not…) I do read this exact more strongly as the sort of control John exerted over Dean potentially, which SUCCESSFULLY worked to make him grow to adulthood disdaining normal life and feeling like they didn’t fit in and were outsiders and freaks who were not a part of regular life. I think Mary is young and headstrong and still in that stage where like Sam she can rebel and choose another life but in this specific moment we’re having demonstrated the hunting life vs normal life that in season 1 we saw better explained by Dean calling himself a freak (or in season 2 Jo calling herself a freak with a knife collection when she tried to go to college, while Sam had the knife collection but was HAPPILY fitting in and in denial, we know Mary DIDN’T fit in and DID sneak off to go hunting, like Jo did). Samuel emphasises the exact annoying Strong Female Character trait of “i’m not like the other girls” but he’s forcing it on Mary, which makes her want to BE like the other girls, even if like Jo or Dean she would struggle to fit in and keep it far more than Sam did with Jess or Amelia, where he could cut it off completely. Mary KNOWS she isn’t “like the other girls” because Samuel made her that way, and so she goes to do the job with a forced smile on her face and to spite Samuel.

I wonder how things would have gone with her and John if Dean had never shown up and Azazel had never caught wind of her, and she had been able to carve her own path with nothing more than Samuel’s influence on her life. How much was she screwed up by being raised a hunter to make her act as she did and how much was the deal a part of it? Azazel promised her suburbia and peace, the same terms of what Dean got with Lisa, and he managed to stick to it until other things intervened, although as 12x10 suggests and like Dean investigating the possible hunt, immediately after being poisoned, in the abandoned hotel, neither of them would ignore when their help was needed even if they were supposedly civilian now. Sam manages to cut himself off completely and in 8x01 he says he looked in the newspapers and saw potential cases and knew it wasn’t his problem because he wasn’t capable of hunting right then/wanted and had honestly more than earned his peace (given the circumstances of Dean and Cas’s disappearance, and, as Sam was doing, ignoring the issue of Kevin).

I’m not saying Sam is less heroic but I think this specific sort of “You can never be like everyone else so do the job” brainwashing from Samuel and presumably John given what we know of how he raised them (Sam himself complains about that a lot in 1x01 but from the safe place of having rejected it at that specific point, again, having completely cut himself off and thinking he’d made a choice for his entire adult life), creates the complex where they HAVE to save people, and Sam got himself out before it got all the way into him; I think Mary is shown here at the crux of it and ironically maybe if she hadn’t made the deal, she would have got out but having MADE the deal even with Azazel’s promise of her suburbia paradise and nothing Supernatural ever bothering her again (as long as she didn’t bother him in the nursery >.>) had a tie to keep her in the life, even as an unresolved *itch* of having that hanging over WHY she got such a peace that never let her truly settle or cut herself off in the way Sam could.

… Also it’s making me think of Dean in the high school episode coming up later in the season, deliberately acting out and self-sabotaging his own life there right when he seemed to be getting popular or cool, or getting anything NICE out of the experience, and the contrast they made with Sonny’s where away from John’s influence he was allowed to flourish and do things like join the wrestling team. (Sam played football and did extra curricular stuff like theatre, or, you know, his homework, and John and Dean both also complicate it by having varying reasons for trying to preserve some normality for Sam on top of being raised as a hunter - John because who knows what he learned about Sam early on in his investigation and Dean just because he wanted to protect Sam wholeheartedly.) If Samuel was poisoning Mary all this time to hate the idea of being a cheerleader, it sounds a lot to me like, since they have this apparently more stable life she probably went to one school all her life, and could have been offered cheerleader but she’s been encouraged to keep away from socialising and doing fun things and Samuel doesn’t support her doing anything that cuts into her hunting time and emotional investment. If she likes cheerleading she might start craving a normal life, you know? At least in this respect John always being on the road got to yank Sam and Dean away from ever starting to feel too normal and comfortable anywhere until it WAS their normal, while Mary probably took a LOT of emotional punishment for being the weird kid at school who’d probably break someone’s nose for teasing her about it but through all the things her father stopped her from doing, presumably had few friends and never got to do anything fun so was always feeling excluded. It’s possible she was even homeschooled/had left school early and so that hypothetical from Samuel is about a life she’s left entirely behind.

Anyway seeing the pain in her plastering on this smile to her father after a comment like this… it’s the most Dean she looks the whole flashbacks we see Amy portraying her and she looks a LOT like Dean in a LOT of scenes because wtf this show’s casting :P


	8. Where Have They Been Hiding You?

Random little thought:

> YED  
> Hello there.
> 
> MARY slices him with the knife.
> 
> YED  
> Where the hell have they been hiding you?

and

> DEAN  
> Then why’d you send me back?
> 
> CASTIEL  
> For the truth. Now you know everything we do.
> 
> […]
> 
> CASTIEL  
> We know what Azazel did to your brother. What we don’t know is why – what his endgame is. He went to great lengths to cover that up.

Both sides are playing each other - HEAVEN knows the true bloodline of Cain and Abel etc etc vessels blah from 5x13, not that we know that yet, and Cas admits that HELL has been covering up their part of the game in activating Lucifer’s vessel. I think if they knew Mary and John were the fated bloodline then Heaven (not Cas, I am certain) knew that this was about Michael and Lucifer’s vessels, because in 4x22 it’s pretty clear Cas is being kept deep in the dark, and in 5x01 Zach is the lowest underling to Michael who probably knows what it’s all about just as Lucifer entrusted only Azazel even knowing Sam was important, while Lilith, presumably reading up lore on the seals in an arms race with Bobby and Heaven stumbles on her part only in 4x18…

Anyway, I just like that Azazel says “where have they been hiding you” to Mary because it’s kind of a joke and a lot of creepiness but it has behind it (or, ahead of it in storytelling terms) a LOT of information about the game being played, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Heaven was trying to keep the vessel bloodline - the main bit of intel they HAD since they arranged the whole thing and had the upstairs looking down vantage point on the bloodline - from Hell’s knowledge. If Dean hadn’t told them who Azazel was next going to make a deal with Samuel and Mary would never have bumped into him, so Dean is an agent in his own story (just like he makes Baby into his car) and I feel like Mary is revealed to Azazel in this moment… More than just a casual comment, but perhaps he was scoping out swathes of potential young families while moonlighting as a crossroads demon, another way to play under the radar to Heaven.

(And I still think it’s another timey wimey thing that they knew this info all along about the events of 4x03 but only because they sent Dean back here. He finds it out at this time of his life but Heaven knows literally as much as he knows about Azazel’s plan because he was here to see it and that information is uncovered for them in 1973…)


	9. 4x03 vs 2x20 and Why Dean Does What He Does

I know I seem to be mostly wandering around canon with an axe to grind but:

> CASTIEL  
> You realize, if you do alter the future, your father, you, Sam – you’ll never become hunters. And all those people you saved, they’ll die.
> 
> DEAN  
> I realize.
> 
> CASTIEL  
> And you don’t care?
> 
> DEAN  
> Oh, I care. I care a lot, but these are my parents. I’m not gonna let them die again. I can’t. No, not if I can stop it.

This is NOT the same message as 2x20 and it’s NOT the same thought process Dean goes through. I feel like people use the rationale from this later episode to just say easily about 2x20 that Dean wanted to come back to the real world because he wasn’t BFFs with Sam and because they didn’t have hunting, and that was the disappointing part of the wishverse - not being with a Sam he recognised. In that version Dean had specifically (seemingly) wished a selfish new reality where everyone was dead who they’d saved in exchange for Mary, and he went to un-wish his own happiness and only realised after setting out to re-hunt the djinn that he was wrong and he was in a coma rather than living in an altered reality which hinged on his selfishness and had condemned a bunch of people for his happiness.

In this case, knowing full well it won’t happen, Cas poses him the thought experiment because encouraging Dean to fight against this destiny is a great way for the angels to find out what happened in these events that Azazel had kept hidden from them without their own eyes on the ground. Dean being all riled up and committed to “stopping it” like he has a chance to do it right now (maybe assuming the angels have given him a shot at stopping the entire apocalypse before it starts?) is exactly what they want because it puts him on the ground at the bit they need to see. If nothing else, Dean’s opted out of this exact thing before in 2x20 so they have to check he won’t do it again. And Dean’s “i care a lot” line is specifically calling back to the fact when faced with this choice before, he made it in favour of humanity.

So how has Dean changed? I mean in 2x21 Sam died and 2x22 he sold his soul so within 2 episodes he was in a radically different stage of his life, and 2x20 partially itself was responsible for his renewed commitment to the job/family hauling him back from how he spent season 2 fairly angry and fed up with John and the job and at several points just wanted to take a long vacation from the entire thing. Despite being the dead opposite of what the djinn wanted, Dean’s guilt about not saving people and living as a civilian found ways to manifest into the dream and prompt Dean to fight against it, which responded to Dean’s whims by creating a full list of the dead from his subconscious and then giving Dean a horrible burdened breakdown at John’s grave about it. The fact Dean cares so much about saving people is what saved him in that case.

And Mary didn’t feel even a fraction as real as this, and Dean didn’t get to find out for sure that John was genuinely a sweet guy - in the djinn dream he’s too complicated so Dean’s subconscious writes him off as dead rather than deal with him. If nothing bad ever happens, now Dean KNOWS his dad was a dork and a sweetie pie and the harmless goof to his mother’s much more complicated backstory. These are real people, opposites to the selves he thought he knew, and therefore not wished out of anything. And personified, real people, victims as much as the ones he saved all along the way in season 1 & 2 who are (mostly) harmless normal people living their lives. Mary wants to leave hunting, and be SAFE. And Dean thinks, if he stops her making the deal then they’ll be able to live normal, happy lives.

(Well, he doesn’t know it’s about making the deal. He hopes it’s about killing Azazel before he ever does whatever it was he did to their family that cursed them, ending it all before it began, and ensuring it never gets that far… I’d argue the difference between “stopping it” and giving them the blessing of an Azazel-free life as Cas gives him this false hope and Mary not making the deal and John staying dead are literally a world apart. One would look more like the wishverse than not. The other would be what we saw in the AU in 12x23 I suppose :P There’s 2 options here. But this is a metaphysical aside because I’m talking Dean’s reasoning here.)

Anyway, it turns his family into something that can be potentially SAVED, as innocents that he as a hunter who knows the ropes here when they don’t, he can undo it all at the root, and so it’s both dangling Mary and John and their future where Mary cries over the idea of her kids being raised as hunters as something to SAVE them from, and it makes it deeply, deeply personal to him. He’s almost presented with an innocent MotW family but with the incredibly painful hook that they’re his parents, even if they’re almost unrecognisable to him as the images he’s held in his head of both - learning Mary is a warrior like him, that John is in her words ‘sweet’…

There’s a power to that sort of thing that seems a very effective way to bend and break Dean (a Dean who has recently been through Hell and remembers it, and Cas points that out in the open of this episode, and if a side-effect is undoing that, is setting their lives back to normal… And he doesn’t even know that Sam is using his powers yet, although that’s pt.2 of what Cas has to show him this episode…) And of course the stakes have been raised to a fight which is escalating towards Lucifer - which is how we left off Dean last episode before this one - and they have just learned that the apocalypse is on the books. Sacrificing the people they saved hunting for the sake of the world is almost a small price to pay, although I think Dean’s mind was much more on the conversation with Mary and seeing how it PERSONALLY affects their family.

To look back at 2x20, it’s a very different decision than choosing to un-wish a civilian life for the sake of the people they saved when it feels like more of a selfish decision than, even though he saw Mary alive in 2x20 and thought at the time that it was really her and he had her back, being given a chance to reset his family when though she doesn’t know she’s asking it, Mary HAS essentially made it clear to Dean what he has a chance to do. And I think with 2x20 in mind, I don’t know if Dean would have the strength to un-wish his mother a 2nd time. In 5x13 he’s essentially asking her to unwish himself, and take never being born for knowing she’s alive and happy. And the final loop of this, is Amara realising the wish in its true, gritty, realistic way which does nothing to the family history but takes Mary from Heaven to resume her life in the moment of Amara’s decision instead, skipping all un-doing entirely.


	10. The Siren Episode, Yellow Fever and eventually Regarding Dean

The ghost sickness episode and the siren episode are sister episodes. It’s been bugging me since the rewatch last year how they had so much thematic overlap mostly because I feel it was reeeally important to explain one through the other but I didn’t have the words for it, but essentially Yellow Fever is the proto version of Sex and Violence before we’re deep in the season and all the themes are coming back around but more serious. 

From Sam’s POV 4x06 sets up his sense that Dean is weaker and compromised by his time in Hell, which in the early part of the season is deep under the surface, but by 4x16 is obviously forefront in Sam’s motivations, and then 4x21 it all bubbles up in that last fight. All it needs to do on that side of things in Yellow Fever is show Sam a very obvious example that Dean is in trouble even if they can’t really express how yet, and there’s the easy excuse of the ghost sickness to blame it on, even if it’s drawing out actual things Dean may feel and amplifying them through a filter of pure fear.

The surface text of 4x14 emphasises the rift and lack of trust between Sam and Dean, again Sam’s need to be strong and thinking Dean’s weaker, Dean gets picked on by the siren because he needs to be compromised for Sam to see that happening to him again and be even stronger in his belief that he alone can stop the apocalypse, explaining On The Head Of A Pin from Sam’s side (the Siren episode through to 4x16 are back to back almost day by day, in comments from the openings of each episode - I bet it’s maybe a week total for the three episodes) - I would say it’s Sam’s fault more than anything the decision was made to have the siren go after Dean, and then the episode was shaped around that.

On Dean’s side of things, then, that means that each episode is playing a part in deeply exposing him, and we, not Sam, are left with a more profound understanding of Dean. Well, we, and these 2 episodes share a resolution, being part of the series of Bobby Comes Save Them and he’s used as an outside set of eyes on them in both episodes, which is where I started off with this train of thought because of realising HOW close their endings were:

  


while Dean squirms under the spotlight and pretends it never happened

  


Bobby thinks some shit at them before he leaves

  


And Dean stands around dealing with the lasting emotional damage from the episodes as he personally and specifically was the one who got emotionally reamed by the episodes, not Sam. 

  


(screencaps from Home of the Nutty - [here](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.homeofthenutty.com%2Fsupernatural%2Fscreencaps%2Fthumbnails.php%3Falbum%3D66&t=MDVjYzNiMjA0MTliNDU2NmRmODE3ODQ0NTY0Nzg3ZTA3ZmE2MWUxZCxZOHk4YnVOMg%3D%3D&b=t%3AEoTmUHpiEEiE91JGAXVv3Q&p=https%3A%2F%2Felizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F151056070938%2Fshower-thoughts-harping-on-season-4-because-being&m=1) and [here](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.homeofthenutty.com%2Fsupernatural%2Fscreencaps%2Fthumbnails.php%3Falbum%3D74&t=Njk5ZTkyMThkOTliYWQ5ZTgzZjdhOWJmNDQxYWVjNjIwZWFjNjZkYyxZOHk4YnVOMg%3D%3D&b=t%3AEoTmUHpiEEiE91JGAXVv3Q&p=https%3A%2F%2Felizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F151056070938%2Fshower-thoughts-harping-on-season-4-because-being&m=1))

I think the two very similar endings where Bobby was the only way to save them from something they couldn’t figure out on their own is interesting enough - 4x14 explains WHY 4x06 had to end this way even when there was no reason Sam couldn’t have figured this out on his own if the writers had wanted to save dragging Jim Beaver onto set for 10 minutes. Dealing with a ghost by themselves is not a tall order but there was a silent message there that was way more obvious when the Siren got between them and the only way to deal with it was to bring in someone not embroiled in their crap who could see it with clear eyes. 

(And I think Sam mis-diagnosing why the ghost sickness chose Dean is a part of that. We can see it went after him because he had SO MUCH to be scared of, but Dean tries hard not to let Sam see that and that early on in the season Sam doesn’t even know Dean remembers Hell yet. WE only find out that Dean remembers Hell as the dramatic conclusion to this episode. It’s the whole Performing Dean thing being the strong big brother that ends up smacking Dean hard in the face in 4x06

Editing with some more hindsight/time passed that this post was circulating and goes much more into depth along with a rare “Kripke says so” that turns out to have been exactly on the same line I was already investigating this and assuming was the reading to make here:

<http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/155557961607/obsessionisaperfume-mittensmorgul>

Which I think should be read in full at this point before continuing as it’s a very good exploration of Dean’s headspace and this conflict :P)  

4x06 also elaborates on some of the themes from the previous episode, Monster Movie, relating to Dean and his adapting to being safe and back from hell, and reasserting his own concept of his identity (hence his issue with being a virgin again). In Monster Movie, a significant subplot is Dean enjoying the perks of being fake FBI, by having a brief, adorable movie romance with Jamie the barwench. He doesn’t break character even when she finds out they’re hunting monsters (eventually admitting they’re not FBI, but even while getting honest with her about other stuff, doesn’t correct the assumption about Sam as his work partner, not adding that he’s his brother or selling the story of what they do, merely admitting they’re not  _official_ _._ ). He seems very happy to keep the whole fling safely boxed into his FBI persona and in turn the episode casts them in movie personas of Mina and Harker, so it’s yet another step removed from their normal selves. Even Jamie’s job gives her the “bar wench” persona over her normal life self not acting as such. It’s a perfect example of the way Dean compartmentalises his various personas, the way he uses the anonymity and passing through town aspects of the job as an emotional safety net in romantic relationships, and of course in the meta episode, escaping into such personas is paralleled with the shapeshifter’s own issues with reality and coping and wanting to be loved and suchlike, and super early in the apocalpyse arc, an example of having to play their roles.

In contrast, Yellow Fever tears that all away from Dean, removing just about everything he uses as a safety net, except perhaps alcohol (ouch). A lot of Dean’s fears are either fairly obvious generic fears, or, like the Yorkie standing in for hellhounds, pretty obvious for Dean and his current trauma. Since the Yorkie is the cold open, we get the answer before we have the question - this is about his Hell trauma and that he remembers it. Then we have this:

Uh, wait, no, I was talking about the badge thing and Dean’s cute blonde of the week

argh, no, hang on, I’ve got some wires crossed, clearly. I’m trying to bring up this instead:

> DEAN  
> This isn’t gonna work. Come on, these badges are fake. What if we get busted? We could go to jail.

[…]

> DEAN  
> Those are real, obviously. I mean, who would pretend to be an FBI agent, huh? That’s just nutty.

(transcripts [here](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.supernaturalwiki.com%2Findex.php%3Ftitle%3DCategory%3ATranscripts&t=ZTdjNzEzY2FjYjNhN2Y4ODM0ZjlmZjZiMzE2M2U1MmQ3NTZlMDY4MSxZOHk4YnVOMg%3D%3D&b=t%3AEoTmUHpiEEiE91JGAXVv3Q&p=https%3A%2F%2Felizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F151056070938%2Fshower-thoughts-harping-on-season-4-because-being&m=1))

That last one is even said TO the person they’re trying to interview: Dean’s facade is falling apart all over the place, and bearing in mind these episodes in the long run serve a plot point about SAM, and how HE perceives Dean, it’s the shit Dean puts on to make him look strong and in control in front of Sam that crumbles as he’s overwhelmed with fear. 

There’s a strong homoerotic element to the episode (I don’t think I’ll ever be over the snake, especially not as this was Dabbflin’s first contribution and now Dabb is the one steering the boat) and specifically related to Dean’s fears, but I don’t think it’s necessarily that he fears Sam finding out, so much as that his macho persona is built around fears it could make him look weak NOT to have that in place.

The point that sells this for me, despite Dean’s fear of the snake in his lap, is that we specifically get that Dean  _isn’t_  scared of  _just_  being interested in men here (even in front of Sam!) despite being terrified of absolutely frikkin everything else he encounters this episode:

  


He also jokes about all the weirdly suggestive names of the teams the men who were the first victims supported, while under the influence of this fear, he’s not worried or anxious to laugh about this or openly imply he understands the suggestiveness of “gamecocks” or “cornjerkers”… If you compare to Dean falling to pieces over the badge thing, aka not thinking his strong facade is sturdy enough to hold up to scrutiny, and even anxiously pointing out how flimsy and ridiculous it is, while discussing the badge. 

Singing along to  _Eye of the Tiger_  likewise has no fear connected e.g. performance anxiety ( _shh_ ) or social anxiety about his music taste - I know it’s a deleted scene but he’s enjoying it on his own at least for a little while before Sam interrupts in the main episode - enough to show he’s drawing comfort and confidence from it and so he still gets to express other parts of his personality in the episode in a way NOT blatantly riddled with fear so yes I am paralleling the musical interlude to Dean hitting on the deputy, sue me :P

His rigid terror of the snake in his lap can be seen as euphemistic of violation or encounters out of his control (see also: Hell trauma) and shows there’s a lot of angles and nuance to the way this is all being explored, going way deep into Dean’s personality and coping methods and the core facts of who he is. The facade he keeps up for Sam ALSO does a double duty for Dean’s own sense of self, and forms a considerable chunk of his comfort zone, self esteem, confidence, etc, in how he presents himself and interacts with the world (obligatory mention of the bar scene with Aaron in 8x13 here since that is another notable moment of destroying the facade for the greater good).

In contrast, Dean might be infected in the opening scene of 4x06 making the entire episode about his breakdown, even if subtly to star with, but he’s not poisoned at all until the end of 4x14, and so the vulnerabilities the siren exploits, getting through Dean’s facade, are all weaknesses Dean offers him accidentally but freely. 

Like with Jamie in Monster Movie, Dean presents the FBI guy facade at the Siren for half the episode between meeting Nick and the realisation after he gets the flask back that they’ve been made all along. Almost all their meaningful interactions are at the sort of one step removed from normal Dean level, being acted as FBI!Dean instead, and I’m not sure there are an other episodes where Dean’s stayed in character THAT long as a plot point with sustained interaction with another character. But of course, 4x05 was the happy example, while the siren episode plays along the same lines as Yellow Fever, using the offered access to Dean to exploit him:

and to crack into all his vulnerabilities so subtly that Dean doesn’t realise it’s happened until it’s too late. In that first encounter he tries to shoo Nick away with that first screencap I posted of him waving the badge at him:

> DEAN   
> (getting out his FBI badge) Excuse me, uh, we’re a little busy here, buddy. 
> 
> [NICK]   
> (getting out his own FBI badge) Yeah, so am I, pal.

(”buddy” “pal” pfft - Nick mirrors Dean’s type of language too)

which is unthinkingly offering their identity to Nick, and immediately being caught out - Dean looks uncomfortable to repeat the gesture, and it’s Sam who identifies them properly:

> SAM  
> I’m Special Agent Sam Stiles, this is my partner Dean Murdoch. What office are you from?

\- remembering his hesitance and fear in Yellow Fever to show his badge off and how tenuously he sells this lie when he’s not confident, it’s always interesting to me that Dean doesn’t offer this information a second time, and sits back while first Sam does, and then Bobby confirms it for them. Already at this point in their interactions, Dean’s facade has been threatened by being made by seemingly “real” FBI, and he is at an emotional disadvantage to Nick when it comes to the presented facade.

Again, these episodes eventually are about Sam in the mytharc, even if they’re about Dean on a personal level, and so Sam taking charge, having confidence and telling Dean to go with Nick, being the one who has caught Cara’s eye and can get the info he wants from her (and then some :P) are exposing these weaknesses in Dean’s facade to Sam even if he might not consciously register it, Dean sinks into a backseat in this scene from the moment Nick waves his own badge at him, and Sam dictates the actions the rest of the episode depend on, while Dean is laughably out of his depth:

> SAM  
> Just take him to the strip club…keep an eye out for the siren. Come on, Dean, just… just focus on the naked girls. You’ll forget he’s even there! 
> 
> DEAN  
> I’m not doing this for you, I’m doing it for the girls.

… which all leads us back to Bobby saving them and offering them colas and giving them their end of episode pep talk while Dean has to get to work repressing everything that just happened to him.

The point I mentioned right at the top about how it was driving me mad how to explain one episode through the other, is of course how the siren episode plays such a strong role in the Dean is bi argument, and we’ve all at least noticed the Dean x the cute deputy stuff from 4x06, but it’s generally under-discussed as it’s really just surface text that he takes a moment to flirt while drunk, so in a way it doesn’t  _need_  much more exploration… But he’s under double influence (ghost sickness and alcohol) and posing as FBI at that point - 3 layers separated from a “standard” Dean capable of being and presenting as a “normal” self…

I feel like 4x06 is one of those episodes which is very obscure on its deeper meaning without a lot more context that the rest of the season brings or even just doing a rewatch immediately after (for example, by never clarifying WHY the ghost sickness went for Dean, except for suggesting it was because he was a jerk, it messes up attempts to read it quickly on the surface, as that’s the offered reading). The Hell memories thing is the subject of many of the episodes following it, even if subtextually an initial watch DOES suggest that a great deal of Dean’s fear stems from that (the yorkie), on a first watch I think it is probably harder to stick a pin in it as it hasn’t been discussed properly yet in the main text for all the time the goofy fear stuff is happening to Dean in the first like ¾ths of the episode, especially as the take away message is Dean’s fear of Sam himself, and what he may become (very presciently bringing back the demon blood thing 14 episodes before Dean finds out and 10 before we do). Dean deflects and lies about the Hell memories being what nearly got him, and with it it’s almost like the episode deflects away too, and turns its focus on What’s Wrong With Sam Now.

Similarly the siren episode calls strongly back to this episode with some themes and definitely the purpose of their existence in the season, and the narrative device of using Bobby at the end in almost doppleganger scenes. I guess they’re like jigsaw puzzle pieces, and that’s where you stick them together?

Sex and Violence takes Dean’s fears from 4x06 and drags them out where you can see the important ones e.g. that final look with Sam’s yellow eyes and that Dean is SCARED of Sam (which is why I suspect the theme of fear was also used): 

> DEAN  
> Well, I don’t know when it happened. Maybe when I was in hell. Maybe when I was staring right at you. But the Sam I knew, he’s gone. 

And has Sam express the impression he has of Dean, which as I’ve said 4x06 would have undermined Dean considerably as the first time he is forced to let his guard down like that and I guess maybe drew Sam’s attention to it if 4x05 is showing Dean’s facade in peak operating condition and letting him pretend nothing is wrong. Anyway I think this is the strongest Sam voices this for a while, maybe until 4x21 when they fight again, which was set up to mirror this scene but obviously with Ruby as the siren between them, and seducing Sam, that time:

> SAM  
> OK, fine. You know why I didn’t tell you about Ruby, and how we’re hunting down Lilith? Because you’re too weak to go after her, Dean. You’re holding me back. I’m a better hunter than you are. Stronger, smarter. I can take out demons you’re too  **scared**  to go near. 
> 
> […]
> 
> SAM  
> You’re too busy sitting around feeling sorry for yourself. Whining about all the souls you tortured in hell. Boo hoo.   
> You’re not standing in my way anymore.

[emphasis mine]

Looking back on Yellow Fever from this perspective, I almost feel like this episode gives it all the remaining context it needs as an elaborate and detailed breakdown of Dean’s psyche, to explain all of Dean’s weird moments about the badge, or WHY there was the interlude to flirt with the deputy, etc. It’s building blocks for the siren episode, but then looking back on it from that episode, you have a much clearer set of information about how Dean feels about Sam, the job, how and why he plays FBI (with 4x05′s help on that one) and an example un-muddied with Sam baggage of Dean showing interest in a dude; he’s compromised by the ghost sickness but NOT in a way that affects his expressing interest in the guy, and draws a cleaner line between the Siren going after Dean because he’s bi,  _and_  because of his issues with Sam, rather than both as one package deal because he’s attracted to Sam (Nick’s personality being the other major thing to argue that from before you get into the details, as he is NOTHING like Sam, but takes traits from Dean). It shows one exists without the other, and even that there’s nothing “wrong” with it - the cute deputy doesn’t get dragged into Dean’s meltdown or contribute to it in any way. Dean’s interest in him is  _not_  a problem or a cause for fear. The Sam baggage happens in other parts of the episode.

Though of course I assume Dean can’t draw the line that there’s nothing wrong with how the Siren got to him - I sort of assume he retreats all the way back into Narnia in the closet for quite some time as a result of the siren episode, because he can’t read it like we do. 

Bobby especially knows  _nothing_  about what happened except that Dean had a male siren and we’re never shown him being told anything else - which again takes us back to the ending scene and what I said about Bobby sort of seeing it all with outside eyes for us. If the other moments of clarity in this episode didn’t do much, a study on what Bobby must be thinking as he sizes them up before he leaves contains a lot of insight. It creates a sort of internal surface level to the text, to have Bobby as this witness character who isn’t getting the full story, BUT has a great deal of insight on them through knowing them so well, and in his way can understand enough of what happened even off this surface reading (i.e. by probably having his own understanding of how ghost sickness may have affected Dean and WHY it picked him, or seeing that Dean has the male siren without knowing the rest (especially as unlike us with a 3 second breath holding moment, he’s sussed out Nick was fake immediately, and had the whole drive down there knowing Dean was in trouble and had a male siren, while we immediately get the brother line dropped on us).

If anything I also think these episodes show Bobby putting a bit too much stock in Dean repressing the shit that happens to him, leaving quickly after seeing they’ll probably be fine to carry on with the job, and he doesn’t interfere until it’s too late and shit has hit the fan at the end of the season.

Still, I feel it’s really important he bears witness to these episodes, and it’s through him I’ve started wondering about it all in the first place and trying to sort out how these episodes really fit together…

(I feel like there’s still something eluding me here and a lot of these thoughts I’ve expressed elsewhere like in [my rewatch notes](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/tagged/weird-rewatching/chrono/page/8) for these episodes mentioned (because trust me I go into it in every single one :P) or other long meta which covers the siren episode or the badge thing, so some of this is just collecting it all together… I feel like I’ve tied this all together so far but there’s still more to say on how the episodes interact, and I haven’t actually WATCHED them yet since last year, and it may be a couple of months depending on how fast the Mum Rewatch happens… But most of my meta posts are unfolding Thoughts On This Thing So Far so I guess I may just have to come back to this another time >.>

* * *

before 12x11 aired we expected a subversion of Yellow Fever and banking on this connection to play a meta join the dots. Did not actually expect Larry or for the “I’ll man the flashlight” reprise to be immediately followed by a mention of 4x14 for the first time since, well, 4x15.

I just want to point at all the ridiculous bi Dean stuff in 12x11 - specifically contrasting Larry to “Marie”, the snake that crawled into Dean’s lap, which was played as a very specific fear of unwanted advances… And as I was saying in the original post, how Dean shows no fear of flirting with Deputy Linus, establishing that healthy, consenting gay shit does NOT scare Dean. 

Dean rode Larry before he had been hexed giving us another point of comparison in the subtext to say what Dean’s feelings are truly: all that subtext is attached to regular Dean, our Dean we know and love had the “hots” for Larry, and it was his reactions when he was finding out with no memory of it where the true analysis is. 

He was proud of himself for riding Larry and managed not to regret it at the end as it had not been something silly he did while hexed, but expressing an actual part of his character, and owned to it on the other side - really it played no part of him being hexed so Sam bringing up at at the end was only to play around with it some more and to lead into the end scene with Larry, as if Sam was actually reflecting on Dean’s behaviour while hexed he would have brought up something entirely different, such as Dean complimenting Rowena’s hair, or admitting to liking Dory, or some other detail Sam actually witnessed.

(Hang on, I just:

> why I’m on the dean is bi train:
> 
> we’d never get a two minute montage of sam “riding larry.”

<http://goodfemalecharacters.tumblr.com/post/157043682096/why-im-on-the-dean-is-bi-train-wed-never-get>)

The mention of the different types of sirens is similarly met with an interested “huh” from Dean, who has been stripped of “hunting” by this point, which as in Yellow Fever, means he’s operating with drastically lowered boundaries (and competence - reduced to flashlight duty). In this case, because a great deal of his defence mechanism comes from, I guess, built in safety features for the life they lead; without that he’s more than normally open, and in this case that means being not at all weirded out by the idea of a male siren.

(You could argue that Dean would think it would be targeting women too but HERE the text is asking for our memory that it went after Dean, and of course with no other details, is basically your typical fandom shitpost of “remember when Dean had a male siren” hashtag Dean is bi, rather than a nuanced discussion on what it maybe/maybe didn’t mean. Considering Glynn’s other subtext and interest in applying Freudian stuff to Dean (from 12x05) and the whole phallic nonsense of the bar and Dean’s banana waffles vs strawberry waffles etc, I am seeing a stance :P)

Anyway, in that moment Sam was either testing Dean or just throwing shit at him to see how he reacted. His response to Dean about the male siren is if he was talking to performed Dean and what that Dean would have said, but the less burdened Dean with no knowledge of his obligation to put up the defences to Sam, just makes an interested noise, accepting it on face value. Again, showing that Dean has several levels of performed interest or disinterest in men or about the concept of being interested in men.

With Larry, as a control subject for Bi Dean subtext, like with Deputy Linus, we see something outside of the effects of Dean under the spell - Dean showing no fear of that flirty encounter, or Dean having ridden Larry seemingly just as unburdened in his day-to-day life at least for a minute, as he was when it was literally taken off his shoulders.

I’d also like to just quickly add a note about the names and badges thing coming back around for another go. One of the threads I link strongest to these two episodes is the Dean as FBI cover thing, especially in relation as a facade. Of course now in 12x11 Dean is forgetting who he is, struggles to remember to get his badge out on time, and like in the Siren episode Sam, who enforces Performing Dean as much as Dean does (like, of course, expecting a certain response he didn’t get from the male siren reveal) is the one to introduce them and their aliases. Of course this also means that we have a fairly good demonstrative moment of Dean not enforcing the barriers of a persona properly to act as the sort of proof of concept of “performing Dean” which for showing not to take Dean at face value, I quite like, as he’s struggling with being REALLY HONEST by forgetting to act either as FBI or like the performed version of himself. 

Dean isn’t WEIRD about it this time, but while being FBI Dean it smooths over his love life issues as part of the distancing from Elke and the actual memory loss does the rest (”like it never happened”), boxing it away in a lie that makes sense with his persona. He had another discarded persona of “Springsteen” from the night before - like he’s burning through personas and actions connected to them. It also means that he rode Larry while not under his own name, and IF he was tracking the witch there (which is blurry in implication) he was on the job, so like the Siren episode or Dean flirting with Deputy Linus in Yellow Fever, some Odd Shenanigans going on under an assumed name, so still a step removed from Dean doing it TRULY as himself, in this light.


End file.
